Ghost Train To The Eastern Star (2008) - Plot & Excerpts
IT is said that travel broadens the horizons; but what to make of pounding the same paths again? In his latest book, American author Paul Theroux retraces the journey through Asia which he took back in 1973 and described in The Great Railway Bazaar (1975), the bestseller which established him as a travel writer.Travelling mostly by train from London through Central Asia, the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia, Japan and Russia, the Asia he sees on his second trip is a globalised one in which most societies are keenly aware that there are other, perhaps better, ways of living: “The places I had known... these homebodies whose horizon was their national frontier, had all (it seemed to me) become soured and discontented... It was now a world of travelers, or people dreaming of a life elsewhere – far away.”Singaporean readers will by turns be angry and amused by his unflattering portrayal of Singapore, one of his stops. Besides the expected criticisms of the chewing gum ban, caning, and the death penalty for drug possession, it also includes his rather dismissive caricature of a people: “Punishment for not toeing the government’s line was always on the Singaporean’s mind. It shows in the Singaporean face, typically an anxious face – pouting kittenish women, frowning nerdish men.”To his credit, Theroux doesn’t deny that he has a bone to pick with this place: from 1968 to 1971, he taught English literature at the then-University of Singapore, but his contract was not renewed, an act tantamount to a firing. On the bright side, he does toss out a few grudging, if somewhat inaccurate, compliments: “No one was fat. No one was poor. No one was badly dressed.” The first statement is fairly true, the second obviously not, and the last will certainly come as news to a nation fond of flip-flops and bermudas. And of course, he bluntly states certain harsh but undeniable truths. Indeed, the reward of reading a travelogue is hearing the honest, if biased, observations about a society by a perceptive visitor, a more personal and heartfelt opinion than that offered by a standard travel guide.Oddly, despite the fact that he told newspapers during his visit here that Singapore was his last stop before going home, in this travelogue he makes it seem as if his trip continues seamlessly on from here to Cambodia, Vietnam, Japan and Russia, before heading back to England.But certain liberties with regard to space, time and even experience are not unusual in this genre. As the author writes preemptively and self-deprecatingly at the start of the book: “Most writing about travel takes the form of jumping to conclusions, and so most travel books are superfluous, the thinnest, most transparent monologuing...dishonest complaining, creative mendacity, pointless heroics, and chronic posturing, much of it distorted with Munchansen syndrome.”Though Theroux would probably balk at being considered a representative American, much of his narrative is tinted with his consciousness of being a citizen of the United States, both a promised land and a global bully. He rather touchingly, if somewhat provincially, repeatedly expresses surprise when people from Turkey to Vietnam don’t hold it against him for being American.As in Gulliver’s Travels, each country the author visits seems to reflect a certain aspect of human nature and of his own society. In Bangalore, India, young educated Indians are given American names, trained to speak with American accents, and then spend their time cold-calling people in the United States for their American clients.And the water-torture device on display at Tuol Sleng, the Pol Pot regime torture prison in Cambodia, reminds him of the Bush administration’s “enhaced interrogation techniques” used on suspected terrorists: “The traveller’s conceit is that barbarism is something singular and foreign, to be encountered halfway around the world in some pinched and parochial backwater... And then, to his shame, he realises that they are identical to the ones advocated and dilgently applied by his own government.”A travelogue isn’t simply a vicarious means to tour the world from the comfort of home. Whether or not you buy the author’s scathing criticisms and earnest praise, his vivid renderings of places and people inspire and provoke, making you wonder what version of the world you would see if you too, hopped on a train to somewhere else.
Travel is forced upon some and for others it is a decadent pursuit (see recent Grazia article regarding Princess Beatrice, Kate Moss, Simon Cowell et al toasting themselves like smug pink seals on the beaches of St Barts). And there is the other category where travel is a way of life and a part of life and Paul Theroux, greatest, frequently most jaded-est and cynical of all modern travel writers falls into the last category. Paul Theroux is the anti-guide. He will not tell you where the best shops are, nor will he flag for you the most beautiful vantage point from which to see the famed ancient ruins of (insert place name here). He will not revel in the fine gastronomy of the region or regale you with tales of charming locals. Instead he will lament his gout and point out how filthy the trains are or how his mouth feels like 17 kinds of sink mould when he's not had a chance to brush his teeth for five days on the Trans-Siberian because all the water has frozen. Ok, that bit didn't happen but it could have. The world is dirty and gritty and real and although there is still romance to be had in travel, there is also squitty bum and pubic lice and unsavoury people with whom you will be forced to share your cramped sleeping car. Re-treading a path taken when he was in his early 30s (and recounted to world wide acclaim in The Great Railway Bazaar), Theroux once again rides the rails to see what has changed as he crosses over one sixth of the worlds land mass by train. Dictators have risen, fallen and risen again and different countries are now at war but he discovers that the relationships, problems and dreams of the people he meets are largely the same. Great winter reading, which lack of glamour aside will still make you want to pack a case and head for the Euro star. I like a realist, love an adventurer and applaud a cynic so Theroux ticks all my boxes.
What do You think about Ghost Train To The Eastern Star (2008)?
Paul, Paul, you’re mellowing way too much. Of, say, the fifty people you meet on this trip, where are the hateful pen portraits of forty-nine of them compared to the grudging likeability of the one exception to the rule? It’s almost the other way ‘round. Giving money to poor rickshaw drivers with hard luck stories? Come on Paul. How about stiffing him and telling him he stinks like a sewer rat? He has a go at a born again American Christian missionary in Thailand, but it is half hearted. Once he would have reduced the poor woman to shreds in a written bitchy retrospective that he would never have dared say to her fat face. Still, that style could become wearing and it’s actually more pleasing to read a more optimistic account of both people and places. I was disappointed, however, that this almost avuncular attitude meant he failed to interview a Bangkok prostitute at any meaningful level whatsoever. This was the man who wrote scathingly about the Arabian predilection for sodomy in “Dr Slaughter” - “You must give me a black kiss” – and the Italian fascination for the same with nuns. Surely he could have had one or two juicy enquiries for this girl? But no, he just doesn’t want to dwell on something that he admits will make him sad and depressed as opposed to angry but inspired.
—Jim
Thirty-three years after the first book Theroux returns to the route he took in The Great Railway Bazaar, or as near as an approximation as current politics will let him – by train from France to Turkey (via the now-shabby Orient Express), through India (where he smirks at the idea of the new technological India, as so much seems the same as ever), Thailand, Singapore (which he finds hypocritical and arrogant), Vietnam, Japan, Siberia, and back. As on the previous trip, he meets people who surprise him and who fit his stereotypes; he looks for the seedy underbelly of new cities, and seeks out local intelligentsia, especially writers who exemplify their land Most notably, he talks with Haruki Murakami, a Japanese writer, who opens Theroux’s eyes about some aspects of Japan. Theroux seems to have read every book imaginable, and is most at home when talking about writers or with writers (or both). It’s a very interesting look, in conjunction with the book that inspired it, at how the west has changed Asia, and how stagnant Asia can be.
—Ensiform
The reader who opens the first page of a travel book is about to embark upon a journey with the author; it helps if they are compatible people. Having travelled profitably with Theroux previously, I found in this book that I came progressively to dislike him more and more.The tipping point was Singapore. In earlier days as a lecturer there, Theroux was apparently badly treated. Now, decades later, he takes his calculated revenge in a long chapter portraying the Lee Kwan Yew regime as harsh and unreasonably punitive, and then goes on to suggest, by portraying the city's sleazy underbelly, that the regime is a failure anyway. Gotcha with both barrels.And herein lies the key to the book. Ostensibly a smart notion to retrace a journey made 33 years earlier and record what has changed, the author is more interested in observing himself. A strange person emerges. One who is overly interested in the sex industry - always at arm's length, you understand ("I walked on") but never failing to record an encounter. Yet, where gambling might also be considered a vice worth investigating, Theroux never ventures inside one of the many casinos he mentions. He finds croupiers less interesting than prostitutes.There are curious digressions. Sport clearly does not engage him. He attends a cricket match in India, betrays no understanding of the game,(someone is "caught leg before wicket") and leaves before the end. On the subject of polo, Kipling - whom he quotes liberally - should have led him to refer to ponies not horses. Ballet, too, is a problem. A performance of "Giselle' is dismissed as waving arms and legs, while "The Sleeping Beauty" sends him to sleep.No such patronising attitude is taken towards the author's own field. There is a long chapter in which a walk in Japan through shrines and temples and ornamental gardens is merely the background to a discussion of other travel writers, not all of whom are admired. The name-dropping is comparable to the identifying of this or that remote village seen from a train window, of which there are numerous instances.Paul Theroux, one fears, is chielly interested in himself - a subject he could have observed without getting on a train.Paul Theroux, one fears, is chielly interested in himself - a subject he could have observed without getting on a train.
—Gerald Sinstadt
