Paul Theroux – The Ghost Train to the Eastern Star (2008)
Travel – 480 pages – my copy (paperback; 2009) bought from Waterstones in September 2009 for £8.99
- 4 nods out of 5 -
Travel – 480 pages – my copy (paperback; 2009) bought from Waterstones in September 2009 for £8.99
- 4 nods out of 5 -
The Ghost Train to the Eastern Star is Theroux’s revisit on the journey he completed when in his early thirties, as described in The Great Railway Bazaar. The book made his name famous and earned him a fortune: but why the return for a man in his mid sixties? The motivation, it seems, is to see if the world he once knew was still out there.
Theroux journeys from London through Europe to Turkey, across the ‘Stans’ to India, around South East Asia, up and down Japan, ending by cutting across Russia on the Trans-Siberian railway. As in the Great Railway Bazaar, the majority of this travelling is done onboard a train, the time spent amassed to not days or weeks, but rather months.
Throughout all, Theroux employs the techniques and skills he possesses as a novelist to bring the countries he visits and the people he meets to life. As he writes:
‘Travel means living among strangers, their characteristic stinks and sour perfumes, eating their food, listening to their dramas, enduring their opinions, often with no language in common, being always on the move towards an uncertain destination, creating an itinerary that is continually shifting…’ (p.89).
This descriptive style is aided by Theroux’s ever inquisitive, forever eager nature. No, he wasn’t ‘a hawk’ in his travels, but ‘more a butterfly’ (p.60).
Theroux notes the poor of India, the snow peaks of northern Japan, the scarred memories of Cambodia, the crazed dictator of Turkmenistan who renamed the days of the week, as well as bread after his mother; as well as the Jains in India who do not eat living things, not even bacteria or mould, going with the philosophy – ‘Why should they be killed because of me?’ (p.183). Every page is full of revelation and wonder: one particular highlight is the visit to Arthur C. Clarke’s home in Sri Lanka, in which the famous writer ‘appeared in a wheelchair, the familiar, smiling, bespectacled, man; upright, balding, but rather frail, even in this heat with a blanket over his skinny legs. He looked like the sort of alien he had described in his prose fantasies’ (p.239).
The continuing theme of the book is that of return: this trip is Theroux’s return to the railways of Asia, of a revisit to his former ways and his former self. He meets former acquaintances from the Great Railway Bazaar, such as the family who run the hotel in Myanmar; the greetings and their stories making this truly heart-warming encounters. Yet there is also the feeling of Theroux’s loneliness and sadness, the realisation that his time on this planet is passing – in stark contrast to the younger man who wrote the earlier volume in the 1970s. This is expressed nowhere more clearly than in the meeting of Oo Nawng, the cyclist driver in Burma whom Theroux befriends and gives as a present money in which to pay for his rent and buy a new rickshaw (p.277). As Theroux notes, ‘Like me, he too was a ghost – invisible, ageing, just looking on, a kind of helpless haunter’ (p.276).
The Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, like The Great Railway Bazaar, is a fantastic travel book. Both describe the same journey, but are, ultimately, written by two different people. This recent edition to the Theroux catalogue is of a man in his twilight years: reflective and introspective, yet still with a thirst for knowledge. Although the world he once knew no longer exist, he is a traveller ever ready for the journey and its mysteries.
