Jenny Diski: Stranger on a train

By JANE WESTAWAY

Jenny Diski should be the patron saint of neurotic travellers, driven as she is to undertake less-than-daring journeys alone yet dogged at every step by fears, furies and self-doubts.

Her last outing was to Antarctica by sea; this latest also begins at sea, with three weeks on a Croatian freighter, but its raison d'etre is a circumnavigation of the United States by rail.

Actually, it's an account of two train trips taken a year apart, but melded here into one eccentric experience that by the last pages has Diski in full panic-stricken flight for London and home.

She has an affinity for circular train trips, she says, because at one point in her troubled adolescence, she spent days she was meant to be in school going round and round the Tube's Circle Line with a supply of library books.

Not a lot has changed: "I'm not much of a traveller at all. I travel in order to keep still. I want to move through empty spaces in circumstances where nothing much will happen," she admits. "What a proper travel writer longs for, I dread: incident."

She chooses America as the destination for this hopefully incident-free, non journey simply because of the movies, and when things are going well, this is the lens through which she views the passing parade.

But some parades don't pass quickly enough. For a fully paid-up subscriber to the belief that hell is other people, a 96,500km voyage on a small ship is high-risk.

Sure enough she is distracted from the pleasures of doing and seeing nothing by two hellish fellow passengers: Stan and Dora.

These two live in a bubble of their own perceived needs, like children. They are insensitive, nosey and excruciatingly boring. When Dora comes across Diski ironing a blouse and tries to tell her how to do it properly, Diski shouts at her, and the reader cheers.

Diski's Amtrak social intercourse is less of a total immersion at least, when she's able to book a sleeper into which she can retreat and shut the door on her fellow travellers. What continually drives her out of these confined quarters and into their arms and earshot is her need to smoke.

"What I did, who I spoke to, what I had to say, was very often directly related to my wish to smoke. The pleasure of lighting up turned out to be as good a way as any other of finding a relation to a place and its people."

Quite possibly, in Diski's case, the only way: it's hard to imagine what else en route would have motivated her to take the plunge into other people's company.

I could go on to tell you which trains Diski caught to where, what they were like, what she saw from her window and what places she stopped in.

I can't see the point, because it's not the point for Diski. Put aside any idea of this being a travel book, and treat it as a memoir - darkly humorous, introspective, writerly, alternately fascinated and appalled by other people and the life stories they so readily share in the fug of the smoking carriage. Then you'll enjoy the trip.

Virago

$49.95

* Jane Westaway is a Wellington writer.