KEY POINTS:
"I woke and yawned and, as always, took a vitamin pill and shaved with my battery-powered razor and brushed my teeth."
So writes Paul Theroux in a travel book which is the next volume of the autobiography he "will never write", but "once envisioned. As Pedro Almodovar once remarked, 'anything that is not autobiography is plagiarism'."
Thirty-three years ago an obviously much younger Theroux took a trip by train from London. He returned to his starting place four months later, having travelled on trains when there were trains, across India and South-East Asia, on the Trans-Siberian Express. He came home and wrote the Great Railway Bazaar, and became the greatest travel writer in the world.
And he was wretchedly unhappy while he wrote it, having returned to find his wife - who was angry with him for leaving her and their children - had taken up with another man. He writes that he "wanted to kill this woman ... because I loved her". He notes that it "was hypocritical of me to object: I had been unfaithful to her".
But never, he seems to suggest, in their home. "It wasn't her sexual exploit that upset me, but the cosy domesticity. He spent many days and nights in my house ..." Why does he, the travel writer who will not write his autobiography, tell us all of this? Because this train journey, 33 years later, is Theroux in search of his younger self, or laying to rest the ghost of that younger self.
But also by way of explaining the tone of that earlier book. "Although it would have added a dimension, I concealed everything about my domestic turmoil. I made the book jolly ..." Jolly? You can think many things about Theroux (and despite the never-to-be-written autobiography, ha, all travel writing is about the writer), but, jolly is not an adjective I've ever thought to apply to him.
I suspect that if you hate Theroux, and he is easy to hate - hardly anyone else could get away with that "I woke and yawned, etc" because there is hardly anyone else who would imagine anyone else would care - you hate his writing. Which doesn't always have to be the case with writers. He has always been arrogant and sure that he is, or would be, better than the other travel hacks. "I had a low opinion of most travel books."
He wanted to, and did, write about travel without the picture postcards sent home. He had something more interesting to say than "this is a beautiful church" and "wish you were here". He does, on this journey, miss his wife (another wife, presumably faithful and not angry) but he is happy to travel alone, eavesdropping on conversations and cultures. "How can you know anything about us from just passing through?" is a reasonable question asked of Theroux and it is one all travel writers ought to ask of themselves.
But Theroux knows that this is what travel is: you drop in, eavesdrop, pass through. He likes the discomfort of travel, which is not so much terrible food and terrible people, but the discomfort that comes from not being able to leave yourself behind. And he knows that travel is about waking and yawning and looking out a window after you've brushed your teeth.
Nobody else could get away with it; but hardly anyone else can get on a series of trains and write an autobiography. Oh yes, of course, he can be a pain, of course he can make a prat of himself and make arrogant observations and whine. That's what travellers do.
Ghost Train to the Eastern Star: On the Tracks of the Great Railway Bazaar
By Paul Theroux Hamish Hamilton (Penguin), $37
* Michele Hewitson is a Herald features writer.
