Paul Theroux

Review of Sailing Through China

Paul Theroux is one of the best-known and most prolific travel writers, the author of dozens of books, several of which have made The New York Times bestseller list. He has traveled extensively by rail, in European nations where rail is the first choice for traveling form place to place, across the mighty Trans-Siberian railroad which has declined since Soviet times but is still vital to the economic life of Siberia, in the extensive networks of China and India and Pakistan, and on South American lines which are now no more after the economic and political convulsions which have struck that continent.

He is well-read and observant, but has an attitude that puts off some readers, especially if he's describing a country close to your heart. Mark Salzman's review of Riding the Red Rooster [link to review] is an example. Henry Kisor contrasts him to another rail writer in Zephyr: Tracking a Dream Across America: "Unlike the more famous Paul Theroux, a cranky traveler who rides railroads in order to map the underbellies of societies he despises, Frimbo never met a train he didn't like."

Yet despite his abrasiveness, he is indeed perceptive and observant. Treat it like a Republican might reading the op-ed page in The Times: Maureen Dowd's columns will tweak all your sensitive buttons and get your blood boiling with its discussions of George W's oedipal complex, but Nicholas Kristoff offers real facts and well-chronicled experiences even if you disagree with all his conclusions. If you're not bothered by his occasional but persistent tone, which some Amazon reviewers have described him as "insufferable" and "one of superiority to everyone he meets," you can find out a lot from under the surface of the cultures he encounters. Indeed, he has been published in National Geographic.

Sailing Through China

by Paul Theroux
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984

From the jacket inside flap:

"Paul Theroux sailed down the Yantze with a party of American millionaires. If this at times surprised the Chinese — which it did — both the idiosyncrasies of the company and the impressions of China itself provided rich material for the kind of percepive, witty writing at which the author excels. One hesitates, in a Chinese context, to describe the boko as 'sweet sour', but there could be worse descriptions: good-humoredly observant on the foibles of his fellow countrymen, on the Chinese future he is often disquietingly apprehensive. The text is stylishly complemented by Patrick Procktor's black and white illustrations."

The jacket copywriter seems to be at a loss to come up with the typical promotional copy. "Disquietingly apprehensive" is a good start at trying to describe Paul Theroux to an unaware browser at the bookstore without launching into an essay like I've done above.

The book feels like a prelude to his much longer, better known, and better selling Riding the Iron Rooster. The opening section (I hesitate to describe it as a chapter given that breaks are marked by a blank line between paragraphs and it's a 64-page book) has a sweeping description of the Yangtze which may help to explain why people will await his next travel book avidly while wishing that he'd get his comeuppance:

"The Yangtze is China's main artery, its major wterway, the source of many of its myths, the scene of its history. On its banks are some of its greatest cities. It is the fountainhead of superstition; it provides incomeand food to half the population. It is one of the most dangerous rivers in the world, in some places one of the dirtiest, in others one of the most spectacular. The Chinese drink it and bathe in it and wash clothes in it and shit in it. It represents both life and death. It is a wellspring, a sewer and a tomb; depthless in the gorges, puddle-shallow at its rapids. The Chinese say if you haven't been up the Great River, you haven't been anywhere."

This time he traveled with a tour group of mostly-multimillionaires, people who visit the Sahara or the Serengeti or the Amazon on monthly excursions without batting an eyelash at the cost. Part of the book is about their foibles and peculiarities, like the millionairess who drank and play cards throughout the $10,000 trip and never left the boat. Much of it boils down to laughing at them, but some of it is rather profound. He notes their love for "briefings," where they get to listen to someone who's paid to tell them what's going on rather than read about it on fifty cents worth of paper.

Of course, the rest of the book is about the Yangtze and the Chinese. There are a couple of pages from a guide to the river given him by Captain Williamson, a Briton who commanded a river boat in the days when foreign navies operated with impunity far inland on China's rivers. The guide reads like a railroad route map: here's a golden Buddha, this city has a magic bell in it. Theroux connects the river to the long continuity of Chinese civilization, the thousand-year-old graffiti next to a sign from a 1920s warlord. And, of course, the majesty of the Yangtze Gorges:

"One of the milionaires said, "These gorges come up to expectations. Very few things do. The Taj Mahal did. The Pyramids didn't. But these gorges!"

It is sad to read this and realize that the most spectacular of the gorges are now underwater, having been submerged by the Three Gorges Dam.

The book ends on a down note:

"For these billion people this is probaly the only system that would work. Under capitalism, five percent would be conspicuously rich, and the rest rather poor or very poor ... If there were disorder here, even a slight amount, I had the impression there would be catastrophe."

But this fits in with Theroux's Luddite view of the world. He looks at the poverty of China's countryside and thinks that this is both the past and the future, that the whole world will look like this once the oil and coal and natural gas have run out.

Overall, the book is an illuminating glance backward, at China in 1984 as contrasted to China of 2004. As Theroux notes on p. 15 parenthetically:

("China," Premier Deng has promised, "will be a modern power by the year 2000.")

One thinks of this and of today's newspaper reports of China, of the great wealth of the coastal provinces and the continued poverty of the countryside, and ponders the onward march of time.

A short book which allows those unfamiliar with Theroux's writing to sample it and decide if they can stand him. It'll either put you off or get you started on his several-dozen rail travelogues.