"I could have forgiven him for complaining about the lack of American-style luxury in Africa's luxury hotels and for so many other weaknesses and peccadilloes that in a fresh-faced first- time travel writer would have looked like brash enthusiasm and now comes across as a smug, jaded view of the world." Author Paul Theroux served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Malawi in the 1960's.
Anthony Sattin on Paul Theroux The travel writer on a villain of the modern grand tour
Anthony Sattin on Paul Theroux The travel writer on a villain of the modern grand tour
Jan 7, 2006
Independent-London
THERE IS a touch of the villain in every hero and more than a touch of the hero about my villain, for he began with such promise. It is now 30 years since Paul Theroux wrote his first and best travel book. Until the publication of The Great Railway Bazaar, Theroux was a minor 30-something- year-old American writer with a half dozen novels to his credit, none of which had sold better than modestly. In 1973, all that changed when he came up with the idea of a non-fiction book about trains, specifically about riding from London Victoria to Tokyo Central Station. His publishers took a punt and offered a pounds 250 advance.
In the 30 years since its publication, The Great Railway Bazaar has sold millions and been translated into 20 languages.
The Great Railway Bazaar was fresh, feisty and so successful that it helped redefine the travel book for a post-colonial, globe- trotting generation. No longer was it enough merely to go somewhere exotic and come home with a few good stories to tell about 'what they do over there'. Theroux's idea of writing about trains pointed the way for a new generation of travel writers who looked for an angle or tight focus through which to view the places they visited " think of Bruce Chatwin with the Aborigines in Australia or William Dalrymple writing about Christians in the Holy Land.
So how did the hero turn to villain? Blame it on the years, I suppose, on the turning of the worm whose name is success. Books such as Kowloon Tong, The Mosquito Coast, My Secret Life and Blinding Light have brought Theroux both commercial and critical success. They also seem to have brought complacency. The signs were clear enough in his 1995 travel book, The Pillars of Hercules, in which he attempted a modern grand tour around the shores of the Mediterranean. The journey itself was fine, but Theroux's reaction to it was so off-message as to suggest that he had lost the plot entirely. Someone should have told him that European readers already know a fair amount about Mediterranean culture, so dishing it up to them as a 'discovery' just wouldn't wash.
Does any of this qualify him as a villain? Probably not. For that we need to turn to his latest travel book, Dark Star Safari. When it was first published, in 2002, I gave it a mixed review. I have thought about it often since then, with increasing fury. Unlike the Mediterranean, which was all new ground, Theroux already knew Africa, having spent time there with the Peace Corps, teaching in Malawi in the 1960s. This was a key period in his life, when he emerged as an author and met V S Naipaul, and which he remembers as something of an Eden. But although he has revisited it in his fiction, most notably in My Secret Life, he has not returned.
Perhaps he should have kept it that way.
The journey was an epic one, Cairo to Cape Town, but the reasons were less epic " to find out if 'perhaps something had changed since I was there' and 'to drop out'. And the start in Egypt is less than convincing, full of little mistakes of history, miscomprehensions of things observed and of the sort of caricatures " the tourist touts, the skinny beggars, the decadent, over-fed Egyptian prince " that smack of racism because not all Egyptians, and not even all the people Theroux met in Egypt, are like this. In order to select these grotesques, the ones he can poke fun at, he must have dismissed hundreds of other less-jibable, yet more representative Egyptians.
I could have forgiven him this weakness " and perhaps cited in his defence, his attacks on Africa's corrupt rulers and the emotion he displays when he returns to the place where he taught in Malawi. I could have forgiven him for dressing up as real adventure a journey that appears in most Africa overland programmes, and one that even sees him travelling with a bus of overlanders. I could have forgiven him for only having half an eye on the book in hand " he is writing an erotic novella and appears to be sketching out his next novel as he goes " because he is such a talented writer he can get away with it.
I could have forgiven him for complaining about the lack of American-style luxury in Africa's luxury hotels and for so many other weaknesses and peccadilloes that in a fresh-faced first- time travel writer would have looked like brash enthusiasm and now comes across as a smug, jaded view of the world.
But having reread this book in the year that was supposed to change Africa forever, I cannot forgive him for writing that 'none of the cities I had so far seen, from Cairo southward, seemed fit for human habitation'. Elsewhere Theroux has written that 'travel, so broadening at first, contracts the mind'. He seems to be writing from self-observation. The arrogance, the laziness, the cultural superiority, the lack of understanding (of, for instance, how US trade and aid policies have increased African poverty) are all inexcusable. Perhaps next time he gets the urge to 'light out for the territory' this educated, elderly, wealthy American can be persuaded to stay home.
E
Anthony Sattin's 'The Gates of Africa: Death, Discovery and the Search for Timbuktu', is published by Perennial, pounds 8.99
