Paul Theroux in Asia Name-dropping, nosy and relentlessly entertaining, the writer revisits the route of The Great Railway Bazaar Toby Lichtig

In 1973, a moderately successful fiction writer set off from London on a train journey through Asia to Japan and back via Siberia; the trip was to be immortalized in The Great Railway Bazaar. Thirty-five years on and decorated in prizes, Paul Theroux is arguably even better known as a travel writer than as a novelist. His Asian train odyssey was followed by similar passages through China, Patagonia, Africa, the Pacific Islands and Britain. Perhaps he thought he’d seen it all: no less inquisitive, though considerably goutier, Theroux recently decided to take the trip again – to become a “spectre” in the scenes of his former life. This time around he has two distinct, if paradoxical, advantages: fame (along the way he looks up a variety of interesting friends) and invisibility (“the usual condition of the older traveller”). Wealth is another boon, though Theroux does his best to ignore this: “luxury is the enemy of observation”.

In 1973, Theroux had wanted to redefine the travelogue. “The travel book was a bore. A bore wrote it and bores read it”, he comments in his new introduction to the reissue of The Great Railway Bazaar. Notwithstanding the dishonour done by this attitude to his various illustrious predecessors (he does acknowledge Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Trollope as exceptions), Theroux has over the years brought to the genre an idiosyncratic brand of dry observation and honest complaint – an attention to the “delay” and “nuisance” intrinsic to the whole experience. Today, his approach seems pleasingly anachronistic. There are no gimmicks – no milk floats to ride or fridges to transport – no hare-brained schemes or impossibly hidden treasure. Instead, there are encounters, observations and, sometimes, wisdom. Paul Theroux is chiefly interested in the fluidity of human life, and one gets the feeling that he could write about the same journey for a third time and not be boring. He moves about, looks around him and tells us what he sees and feels. Few do it better.