Theroux back on the train

Thirty-three summers ago, a normally reserved friend of mine fairly burst through my screen door, fumbling a book in his hand. He stuck it under my nose. "Read this immediately," he demanded.

It was Paul Theroux's "The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train Through Asia," chronicling his epic journey, taken alone and fraught with peril, overland by train whenever possible through Europe and Asia to Japan and back across the vast expanse of The Soviet Union from Vladivostok to Moscow aboard the Trans-Siberian Express, thence to London, returning to the same train station he had departed four and a half months earlier.

For me as for thousands of others, "The Great Railway Bazaar" was a transformative experience. Theroux radically revised the genre, focusing not on destinations but on the experience of travel -- the tedium, the anxiety and the small rewards of getting from place to place. Instead of the usual accounts of museums and monuments, Theroux developed characters, recorded dialogue and gave us strange and wonderful encounters in far-flung regions. It had the narrative drive of a first-rate novel and the unfakable gut of nonfiction. This, you felt, was really happening. The "Bazaar" became a best-seller and instant classic

Since then, Theroux has given us travel books covering the Americas, England, China, the Mediterranean, Oceania and Africa, all marked by the same distinctive eye and voice, the same thoughtfulness, personal courage and sanity.

Thirty-three years after he took the "Bazaar" trip, Theroux retraced his route, or most of it, in "Ghost Train to the Eastern Star," a brilliant reprisal of his earlier trip, displaying Theroux's singular powers of observation, at sketching people and places with extraordinary economy and precision.

Much has changed, of course. Choked India is now more desperate and taxing than ever, a nation divided, or multiplied: a jumble of cell phones and saris, of Ravis and Kapoorchands remade as IT drones Bob and Josh jostling with vast impoverished traditional populations. Thailand is similarly a gazpacho of the ancient and ultramodern, of indigenous and imported. Miraculously resilient, Vietnam has emerged from the nightmare of war as a vibrant nation of superb food and spirited entrepreneurship.

On the other hand, countries brutalized by civil war or criminal regimes, Sri Lanka and Myanmar for example, seem to have changed hardly at all, their architecture beautifully arcane, their people often desperate but still friendly and clinging to hope.

Theroux's usual preoccupations are the stuff of "Ghost Train": his love of locomotion; his fascination with pornography and the sex trade; his engagement with cultural and literary traditions; his trenchant critique of political regimes; his hatred of missionaries; his delight at finding someone reading one of his books in a faraway place; and his custom of searching out important writers to interview along the way. We get encounters with Nobel laureate Orham Pamuk in Istanbul, the moribund Arthur C. Clarke in Sri Lanka, Haruki Murakami and Pico Iyer in Japan.

Though true to the spirit of the earlier book, "Ghost Train" is unlike "The Great Railway Bazaar" in two significant ways. Devotees will be disappointed that Theroux doesn't take the Simplon Orient Express to Istanbul (the trip would have cost $9,000) opting for the much cheaper (and drearier) northerly route through Vienna, Budapest and Bucharest. He is refused a visa for Iran, and Afghanistan is out of the question, which means that from Istanbul, he travels through Georgia and the Stans next door -- Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan -- flying over Pakistan to Amritsar. From northern India, he's essentially faithful to his earlier route.