Ghost Train to the Eastern Star by Paul Theroux (Houghton Mifflin)
Grouchy Old Paul, the curmudgeon who constantly tops bestseller lists, is a man I stopped reading long ago. I grew weary of his world view that reeked of ugliness and assumptions, wondering why he left home if every place he saw only sparked more visions of the coming apocalypse. He was like a secular preacher howling constantly about the Book of Revelations.
But Covid-19 has made desperate readers of us all and in desperation I purchased a cheap download of Ghost Train to the Eastern Star. It stayed untouched on my kobo until finally, in even greater desperation, I began to read it--and to my immense surprise, enjoyed it.
This rail journey through Asia is a personal odyssey, retracing the train tracks that led Theroux to fame thirty-three years earlier in The Great Railway Bazaar. No longer a young man with a crumbling marriage, Theroux divulges the unhappy background that pervaded his former journey, admitting that his travel writing is the only autobiography he will probably ever write.
“Travel for me,” he says, “is a way of living my life,” and is “one of the laziest ways of passing time.” Theroux is far from lazy on his journeys. He may be one of the world’s indefatigable note-takers, recording the details of conversations, meals, and his assessments of people he sees along the way that verge upon the novelistic. His descriptions of landscapes and of cities are precise and sensuous as he glides past them in a railway carriage. This is a man who never stops working. Lazy? Not at all.
When Theroux’s happy, his words glisten. When he’s miserable, he can make the skin on a reader’s eyeballs crawl. A man who has little love for Tokyo or New York, he is passionate about Istanbul, a city that is “grand and reimagined,” “a water world,” a city with the soul of a village.” His account of neighboring Turkmenistan, on the other hand, borders on the surrealist absurdity of nightmares, with its leader who renamed the months of the year and days of the week in a way that locals find impossible to remember.
His trip is punctuated by a literary pilgrimage, visiting Orhan Pamuk and Eli Shafek in Istanbul, Haruki Murakami in Tokyo, Pico Iyer in Kyoto, and in Siberia following the ghostly footsteps of writers who had been imprisoned in the Gulag Archipelago. But perhaps the most insightful conversation he has is with an IT manager in an Indian call center, who says the only way to solve that country’s population problem is through education, because without that, the only diversion people have is sexual intercourse.
Theroux’s preoccupations are not those of the usual traveler. Art, politics, and food are topics that he passes over rather quickly. Instead the man is a connoisseur of snow, “smutty and discolored in Hungary,” “the heavily upholstered world of deep snow” in rural Japan, “the icy-bright trees” and “trackless snow” that gave the appropriate solemnity to “the only intact gulag prison remaining in Russia.”
He is also a man who seeks out pornography as “the quickest insight into the culture and inner life of a nation,” and rates it on a demanding scale in almost any place where he spends more than a few hours. From the “grubby stuff” featuring “very fat people” in Hungary to Singapore’s Orchard Towers with four floors of women for sale, Theroux painstakingly investigates these cultures. When Murakami takes him on a tour of Tokyo, they end up at Pop Life, “six stories of porno.”
As a solitary traveler, Theroux is far from the invisible figure of ghostliness that his age might confer upon him, a fate that he has anticipated. Even in Hanoi, he’s persistently offered female companionship and he seems to find it rather praiseworthy that he resists. But what attracts the most attention is that he travels alone and by train, when he could obviously be whisked about on a plane.
“Memory is a ghost train,” Theroux says and he is a master of recording and transmitting his memories. Only on a train are memories made so rapidly, seen through a pane of glass and then fading into the distance, captured in a conversation with another passenger who will never be seen again, pulling into a city that can be left on a whim. Paul Theroux has made this sort of travel into an art form, a niche of literature that belongs securely to him. There are no imitators, only Grouchy Old Paul, his notebook in hand, measuring and recording the loneliness of the long distance traveler.~Janet Brown