In Praise of Paul Theroux

 

 

As a bit of a traveller myself, I have a number of ways of staying amused on flights, short or long, and train rides that, with the best will in the world, can get a tad tedious. A long night flight - Frankfurt to Almaty, let's say, or a New York - Heathrow red-eye, lose their appeal once the meal service is out of the way, especially if you're travelling in Economy Class (and just why do the Americans insist on calling the cheap seats "Coach"?).  

You're crammed into narrower seats with less leg-room and a limited recline so it's impossible to get comfortable for a doze, rather than in the heinously expensive Business or First Class cabins with lie-flat seats, decent bedding (quilts and a pillow rather than thin, itchy, airline crested blankets that are too short).  The In-Flight Entertainment systems can be dull and repetitive - endless re-runs of crass "comedy" shows like The Big Bang Theory (can someone please explain its appeal, because it's beyond me.....?) or the latest three month old Hollywood blockbuster that you've probably already seen on the big screen with surround-sound rather than via a tablet sized seat-back screen and plastic earbuds (one side of which is probably dead).  I'm afraid I don't find that at all entertaining.

Looking out of the window is no help, either.  It's fine during take off or landing, when you at least have brightly lit cityscapes to enjoy (weather permitting), but once you hit your 40,000 foot cruising altitude there's just blackness, perhaps broken by the regular flash of the wing-tip hazard light (not even that if you're sitting in front of the wings).   

On trains, it's the same: even the most beautiful Alpine scenery is irrelevant if it's dark.  Then all you have to look forward to is a fleeting glimpse of brightly lit stations as you clatter through (or whoosh through on a modern high-speed train) and the surrounding streetlights of village or town or city.  And of course, unless you've booked a sleeper cabin to yourself, you're not going to get a lot of sleep (or privacy in a shared cabin - which can be....ummm...interesting), and there's no IFE showing The Big Bang Theory or anything else.  

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So I always make sure I have at least one or two good books in my hand baggage to keep me going.  It doesn't matter whether its fiction or non-fiction, history or politics, travel or biography: anything is better than The bloody Big Bang Theory!

There is often a travelogue of some kind, though. Something about them chimes with my own life (or at least my old pre-retirement one). I've always enjoyed visiting new places: in my childhood, locally new fields to play in, a different Pevensey Bay caravan site for the annual holiday with my mum and dad.  Later on, at big school, further afield - school trips to warehouses and museums and theatres as scattered as Maidstone, London and Stratford-upon-Avon, and even a couple of day-trips to Calais.  Later still, Boys' Brigade summer camps in Devon and the Isle of Wight, a football tour of Belgium, and in my teens a holiday with my mates to Butlin's Holiday Camp in Minehead (I still shudder at that memory....).

Work eventually took me abroad, to Brussels and Luxembourg, Geneva and Montreux, Amsterdam and Frankfurt and Madrid and Vienna.  And family holidays in Jersey and frequently Cornwall, and Majorca and Ireland.  My travelling life had begun, and continues to this day (even if much reduced by the Pandemic Years and retirement).

It was in my early business travel days that I discovered Paul Theroux.

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Theroux is an American writer, and his volume of works includes novels and short story collections, many travel books and even a memoir and appreciation of the late writer V.S. Naipaul (often described as Indian but in fact Trinidadian).  He also contributes essays and stories to a number of publications - on his own admission he has for over 50 years accepted pretty much any writing assignment offered to him as a means to earn money and pay the bills (which sounds about right to me: I just wish some bugger would lob a few commissions my way!).  He is also the father of Louis Theroux, the journalist and writer who makes a successful career out of chronicling the weird and wonderful and downright wacky individuals (and their odd beliefs and outrageous behaviours), mostly American it has to be said, that are at best amusing and at worst downright unsettling, for British television.

Like every American writer I've ever read (and admittedly that is not a huge number), with the  honourable exceptions of Stephen King and John Updike, his prose can be a little turgid and, for want of a better term, Americanese, which can be a bit clunky to English ears (and sorry to any American readers who may stumble across this piece and find my own English style equally bad). You know the kind of thing from CNN: "The President said Monday evacuation would start Thursday...." rather than "The President said on Monday that the evacuation would start on Thursday...".   But it's worth persevering to get the value and enjoyment from his books.

I stumbled across The Great Railway Bazaar at a bookshop on Victoria Station and bought it on a whim.  The basic premise was simple: catch the 8:25 Boat train from Victoria to Dover and onto the Channel ferry, then hop on the first train to come in at Calais station, and head east, doing the same at each successive stop.  The journey ended up taking about six months, passing through Europe, the Middle East and South East Asia, before returning home on the Trans-Siberian Express. Clearly, much planning must have gone into the journey beforehand, not least obtaining the correct visas for that Russian return (this was long before the Fall of Communism and the Berlin Wall) but no matter: I was hooked. It was the sort of journey that appealed to me (still does...): a true adventure, travel for travel's sake, and as I was to learn with reading other Theroux books, doing it on the cheap: no five star hotels, no first class tickets, no chauffeur driven limos, just rickety trains, overcrowded buses and battered old Land Rovers or Jeeps.

But the thing that captured my imagination was not long and dull descriptions of the passing landscape, or the type of locomotive and carriage - although all of that was there and clearly necessary.  No: it was Theroux's descriptions of the people he met and talked to on the trains, ordinary people, often poor peasant farmers or factory workers or harassed mothers with misbehaving kids, and he paints wonderful vignettes of them all.  He's a nosy old bugger, quite happy to ask personal questions and pry into their intimate family lives, argue with them about politics or religion or sport, and then put it all into his writing (whether the people like it or not). It's a skill, a difficult one to master, and Theroux still does it  supremely well.  Much as I admire and enjoy the books and tv shows other travel writers like Michael Palin and Chris Tarrant and Simon Reeve produce, their work sometimes comes across as a bit lightweight, carefully scripted to avoid controversy or offence, and only skimming the surface of the countries and people featured.  Theroux is adept at digging under the surface to get the real stories.

Many of his books follow a similar pattern: Riding the Iron Rooster covers a year long trek through China and Mongolia, again by train (his description of an overflowing spittoon at the table next to his in a Beijing railway station cafe makes me heave to recall); The Old Patagonian Express chronicles a similar rail wander from his home in Boston all the way to Patagonia,at the most southerly tip of South America; The Pillars of Hercules covers a circumnavigation of the Mediterranean Sea; while The Happy Isles of Oceania chronicles an epic journey by canoe around the Pacific islands in the wake of a divorce (one hell of a way to put a broken marriage firmly behind you).  There are trips by bus and truck and canoe from Cairo to Cape Town in Dark Star Safari (re-visiting the Africa he knew as a young Peace Corps volunteer in the early 1960s) and a road trip around the southern, Bible-belt states of Obama's USA in Deep South. I'm now halfway through another meandering road trip, this time On the Plain of Snakes in Mexico, exploring the area where Trump promised a Mexico funded Wall, and deeper into the deserts of southern Mexico to understand what the people think of America and its divisive politics (not a lot evidently).  I thoroughly recommend them all.

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His fiction is less accessible, but there are a few I've read or am familiar with.  Mosquito Coast was made into a powerful film starring Harrison Ford (saw and enjoyed the movie but not read the book).  I did read his first novel, Waldo, but remember nothing about it, and Milroy the Magician, a mildly amusing satire on American consumerism and fast food (no, really!) that is reckoned one of the best American novels of the 1990s. I found them to be difficult, both to read and understand, and enjoyed neither.  

O-Zone was better, a dystopian sci-fi novel in which a nuclear power accident has turned the state of Missouri into a wasteland populated only by a handful of extremely wealthy individuals who use it as a playground in which to hunt the "things" outside their secure and walled cities- who may or may not be human survivors of the disaster and their descendants.  Did I enjoy it?  At the time, yes - but a gap of more than 30 years has not been kind and means much of it has left my memory and my tastes have changed.  It's not a book I would return to.

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So for me, Theroux is a fine and clever travel writer who really paints superb pictures of his journeys, brimming with little details and nuances that other writers miss, and is very definitely an influence on my own scribbling.  His books can be read multiple times without becoming boring - indeed, I tend to find new stuff to enjoy each time I return to one of them.  

Give him a try: you'll enjoy them, I'm sure.  Just leave the fiction!