Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, Paul Theroux, Penguin, Rs 550
Has too much travel made Theroux tetchy?

Paul theroux doesn’t think highly of travel writers. Their occupation is “one of the laziest ways on earth of passing the time… an elaborate bumming evasion”. They’re fond of “jumping to conclusions, and so most travel books are superfluous”. He’s even more scathing about those who retrace the footsteps of other writers: “opportunistic punks” indulging in a “glib debunking effort for a shallower, younger, impressionable writer”.

Having got that off his chest, he justifies his return to the terrain he wrote about in The Great Railway Bazaar. “Curiosity” and “dreams” are among his compelling reasons. And so, 33 years after he embarked on that expedition at the age of 33, Theroux boards the 12.09 from Waterloo to Paris to find out what’s changed and what hasn’t.

The actions of politicians and warlords meant that returning to Iran and Afghanistan was out; instead, he travels through Georgia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. City squares, streets and bylanes, bars and massage parlours are the places that he primarily talks about, apart, of course, from his train journeys, the stations, food and passengers.

Serendipity and the ability to not take oneself too seriously, those essential companions of the interesting traveller, are largely absent here. Even though it is clear he hasn’t planned every detail, most of his accounts have the same ring to them. He likes places that haven’t changed all that much, among them Amritsar and Myanmar (the country, not the government). He’s scornful about Singapore, heaping pages of criticism on its authoritarianism. He’s illuminating about how the totalitarian regimes of Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan have turned the lives of citizens into a low farce. And his Vietnam sojourn – among the most moving in the book – reveals that the spirited Vietnamese bear no ill-will towards America; they just want to get on with their lives.

... contd.