In 1973 Paul Theroux boarded a train in London with a simple, slightly mad plan: to go east by rail as far as the tracks would take him, across Europe and the whole breadth of Asia, and then to loop home again on the Trans-Siberian. The Great Railway Bazaar is the account of that four-month journey, a procession of legendary trains, the Orient Express, the Khyber Mail, the Mandalay Express, strung together into one long ribbon of motion. Theroux's wager, vindicated many times over since, is that the journey itself is the story, that the romance of travel lives not at the destinations but in the rocking, in-between hours of the train.
What sets the book apart from conventional travelogue is where Theroux points his attention. He is largely indifferent to monuments and set-piece sights; what he wants is the human theater of the compartment, the strangers he is thrown together with for hours or days. He renders them with a novelist's ear for dialogue and an eye for the revealing gesture, and the cumulative effect is a portrait of a continent drawn almost entirely from conversations and small encounters. He is wonderful company on the page, curious and quick and very funny, and the book moves with the easy momentum of the trains it describes.
The honest caveat is Theroux's temperament. He can be acerbic, even sour, quick to judge a fellow passenger or a whole country, and a reader who wants their travel writing warm and uniformly generous will sometimes wince. There is a prickliness to him that is part of the appeal for some and an irritant for others, and a handful of his attitudes carry the dust of their era. He is not a comfortable companion so much as a vivid and unsparing one, and the book is the better for not pretending otherwise.
Why you should read
- Readers who love train travel and slow journeys
- Fans of sharp, character-driven travel writing
- Anyone curious about the roots of the modern genre
- Those who don't mind a prickly, opinionated narrator
What to expect
- Four months of trains across Europe and Asia
- People and conversations over monuments and sights
- A funny but acerbic, sometimes sour narrator
- A foundational classic of modern travel writing
What endures is the sheer pleasure of the ride and the influence it left behind. Theroux essentially reinvented the rail journey as a literary form, proving that you could build a gripping book out of nothing but trains, talk, and a sharp pair of eyes, and a long line of travel writers followed the track he laid. To read it now is to be reminded of a particular romance, the slow crossing of a continent at ground level, watching the world scroll past the window while strangers tell you their lives. Dated in places and tart throughout, it remains one of the most purely enjoyable travel books ever written, and the one that taught a generation how to ride. It is the kind of book that infects you with restlessness, that has you checking timetables and pricing improbable journeys before you've even finished it. Decades on, the trains have changed and some have vanished, but the pleasure of riding along with Theroux has not dimmed at all.
