Four faded, tattered, ink stained notebooks covered four months, 28,000 miles, and the better part of every train stop from London to Tokyo and back again by way of vodka laced Siberia. By the time I put down the resulting compilation of those notebooks, Paul Theroux’s The Great Railway Bazaar, I felt like I had come and gone again past the point of traveling return.
That’s when you know it’s a good travel book.
The Orient Express, the Khyber Pass Local, the Frontier Mail, The Golden Arrow to Kuala Lumpur, and the Trans-Siberian Express. Armed with an extensive supply of tobacco, wine bottles, self-preservation, and literary sense, Paul Theroux takes the reader on a ride of all of these imagination-generated trains and recounts his experiences with culturally insightful anecdotes. Conscientious civil servants in Punjab, the thick Bulgarian sausages debacle, ice generated sleeping cars, displaced imperialistic cultures, self-righteous gajin, eternal Siberian darkness and 392 pages of other adventures left my thumbed copy looking like it felt—sun faded pages dripping with dampness after being cooked in wine and miles.
Which is why, towards the end of the book, the reader feels much like Theroux and many a six year old—can we go home now? This is when the integrity of the book becomes clear. The idiosyncratic and eclectic stories are not the underlying feature of the book, but rather the traveler’s spirit. And after 28,000 miles in four months away from family and familiarity, the traveler and, by the good graces of talented writing, the reader are simply worn down and undone. I’m not sure who was more glad to be done, me or Theroux. But then again, a trip that ends with you thinking fondly of home, is usually the best kind of trip of all.
