The Great Railway Bazaar by Paul Theroux
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
In many ways, Theroux does not warm up until the end of the story. The longest part of the journey — through Siberia — is in some ways the shortest. It is there that the narrative becomes most lucid, as a scene. Before that, his musings on Japan, Burma and Singapore also add a quality of place that was missing early on, perhaps because early on he was more interesting in passengers than on places.
This travelogue is simple. He chronicles a travel the way you’d expect. In some ways though, he misses out on what makes trains so special to him. He sets out on a journey and then writes about it and then it’s over. Travel is much about familiarity as much as it is about what is alien. The insular beginning and the difference of ending could have used a better control of coherency as to what this book was about.
