The Trans-Siberian Express is one of the world’s most famous transcontinental journeys, spanning Russia from Moscow to Siberia. But in American novelist and travel writer Paul Theroux’s Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, the Trans-Siberian is merely his way back home after a gruelling journey from London to Tokyo across Asia, mostly by train.
Theroux crossed Europe by train, going through Turkey and Central Asia, the Indian subcontinent, and Southeast Asia, before traversing half of Japan. This bold journey was not even the first time he had done it. This was actually an attempt to replicate an earlier one he made in the 1970s, which he wrote about in The Great Railroad Bazaar.
Going through over a dozen countries, Theroux writes at least one chapter about each of them, while India and Japan get several chapters. I found the chapters on Sri Lanka and Myanmar very interesting as those countries were going through civil conflict and authoritarian rule respectively.
The chapter on Singapore is surprisingly colorful as it mentions the seedy side of that super-modern island state. Theroux is scathing about Singapore’s nanny state and its famous leader Lee Kuan Yew. He finds Eastern Europe (Romania, Hungary) and Central Asia to be bleak and dowdy.
However, one of the most memorable chapters is about the Trans-Siberian Express. During the trip, Theroux stops off at a Russian town which has one of the last remaining gulags, which has been converted into an asylum. Theroux talks about how harsh the gulags were, used by a repressive regime under Josef Stalin to obtain mass slave labour by imprisoning its own citizens on often spurious charges to rebuild the economy. Writers were also victims of the gulags, being critics of the state, with Nobel laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn being a famous example.
Theroux’s local guide also had a direct connection to the gulags as his uncle spent 25 years in one. The uncle was arrested in 1946 for picking up a few grains of wheat from a field because he was desperately hungry. Russia is not a country that I’m too interested in or care too much for, but I did feel sad for its people after I read this.
During his travel, Theroux meets with famous writers including Orhan Pamuk in Istanbul, Arthur Clarke in Sri Lanka, and Haruki Murakami and Pico Iyer, who is Theroux’s friend, in Japan. He is extremely frank, perhaps too frank, about his conversations with Iyer, during which they talked about other writers including VS Naipaul, the Trinidadian-British Nobel laureate who Theroux had a significant falling out with after having been longtime friends. Theroux would then write a book about their friendship and breakup called “Sir Vidia’s Shadow.”
Though this book was published in 2008, it is by no means out of date. The world may have changed, but some things are still almost the same. Theroux is especially critical of China, decrying its soullessness (though he also says that about Tokyo) in its wanton pursuit of wealth at the cost of its environment, historical preservation and social morals.
Having read Theroux’s Dark Star Safari, as well as Last Train to Zona Verde, both of which were about his travels through Africa, I would say he is less critical and pessimistic about Asia. However, like Dark Star Safari, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star (the names of two of the trains he took during his journey) is also a superb read about a continental journey.
