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Ghost Train to the Eastern Star: On the Tracks of the Great Railway Bazaar Paperback – August 6, 2009

by Paul Theroux (Author)

4.5 864 ratings

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Thirty years after the epic journey chronicled in his classic work The Great Railway Bazaar, the world’s most acclaimed travel writer re-creates his 25,000-mile journey through eastern Europe, central Asia, the Indian subcontinent, China, Japan, and Siberia.

Half a lifetime ago, Paul Theroux virtually invented the modern travel narrative by recounting his grand tour by train through Asia. In the three decades since, the world he recorded in that book has undergone phenomenal change. The Soviet Union has collapsed and China has risen; India booms while Burma smothers under dictatorship; Vietnam flourishes in the aftermath of the havoc America was unleashing on it the last time Theroux passed through. And no one is better able to capture the texture, sights, smells, and sounds of that changing landscape than Theroux.
Theroux’s odyssey takes him from eastern Europe, still hung-over from communism, through tense but thriving Turkey into the Caucasus, where Georgia limps back toward feudalism while its neighbor Azerbaijan revels in oil-fueled capitalism. Theroux is firsthand witness to it all, traveling as the locals do—by stifling train, rattletrap bus, illicit taxi, and mud-caked foot—encountering adventures only he could have: from the literary (sparring with the incisive Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk) to the dissolute (surviving a week-long bender on the Trans-Siberian Railroad). And wherever he goes, his omnivorous curiosity and unerring eye for detail never fail to inspire, enlighten, inform, and entertain.

PAUL THEROUX was born in Medford, Massachusetts, in 1941 and published his first novel, Waldo, in 1967. His fiction includes The Mosquito Coast, My Secret History, My Other Life, Kowloon Tong, Blinding Light, and most recently, The Elephanta Suite. His highly acclaimed travel books include Riding the Iron Rooster, The Great Railway Bazaar, The Old Patagonian Express, Fresh Air Fiend, and Dark Star Safari. He has been the guest editor of The Best American Travel Writing and is a frequent contributor to various magazines, including The New Yorker. He lives in Hawaii and on Cape Cod.

Print length

512 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Mariner Books
Publication date

August 6, 2009
Dimensions

5.31 x 1.23 x 8 inches
ISBN-10

9780547237930
ISBN-13

978-0547237930
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Editorial Reviews

Review

.readers will find his usual wonderfully evocative landscapes and piquant character sketches...No matter where his journey takes him, Theroux always sends back dazzling post cards." Publishers Weekly, Starred

"Theroux wanders to places that scarcely cross other travel writers' minds, among tham Vientiane ('a sleepy town on the banks of the muddy river, famous for its cheap beer') and Phnom Penh ('scruffy, rather beaten-up...like a scarred human face in which its violent past was evident'). He also keeps up a running argument with the books he reads along the way, to say nothing of his contemporaries )Chatwin never traveled alone, he harumphs, and neither does his bete noire Naipaul."

Kirkus Reviews

"Brilliant. No one writes with theroux's head-on intensity and raptness, and his descriptions made me want to jump on the next plane to Istanbul (and also, of course, to many of the other places he evokes). I particularly loved the spectral motif, the ghosts and shadows and underground presences that flit through the narrative, giving the whole a half-seen and haunting dimension that no book of travels I've ever read conjures up." --Pico Iyer

“As thoughtful and observant as ever…this trip finds Theroux reflecting not only on changes to the landscape but also to himself…a wonderful book infused with the insights of maturity…it’s a reminder that in this age of increasingly homogenous urban centers and easy air travel, those who really want to discern national differences should stay on the ground.”

Booklist, ALA, Starred Review —

About the Author

PAUL THEROUX is the author of many highly acclaimed books. His novels include The Bad Angel Brothers, The Lower River, Jungle Lovers, and The Mosquito Coast, and his renowned travel books include Ghost Train to the Eastern Star and Dark Star Safari. He lives in Hawaii and on Cape Cod.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

You think of travelers as bold, but our guilty secret is that travel is one of the laziest ways on earth of passing the time. Travel is not merely the business of being bone-idle, but also an elaborate bumming evasion, allowing us to call attention to ourselves with our conspicuous absence while we intrude upon other people’s privacy — being actively offensive as fugitive freeloaders. The traveler is the greediest kind of romantic voyeur, and in some well-hidden part of the traveler’s personality is an unpickable knot of vanity, presumption, and mythomania bordering on the pathological. This is why a traveler’s worst nightmare is not the secret police or the witch doctors or malaria, but rather the prospect of meeting another traveler.
Most writing about travel takes the form of jumping to conclusions, and so most travel books are superfluous, the thinnest, most transparent monologuing. Little better than a license to bore, travel writing is the lowest form of literary self-indulgence: dishonest complaining, creative mendacity, pointless heroics, and chronic posturing, much of it distorted with Munchausen syndrome.
Of course, it’s much harder to stay at home and be polite to people and face things, but where’s the book in that? Better the boastful charade of pretending to be an adventurer:

Yes, swagger the nut-strewn roads, Crouch in the fo’c’sle Stubbly with goodness,

in a lusty “Look-at-me!” in exotic landscapes.
This was more or less my mood as I was packing to leave home. I also thought: But there is curiosity. Even the most timid fantasists need the satisfaction of now and then enacting their fantasies. And sometimes you just have to clear out. Trespassing is a pleasure for some of us. As for idleness, “An aimless joy is a pure joy.” And there are dreams: one, the dream of a foreign land that I enjoy at home, staring east into space at imagined temples, crowded bazaars, and what V. S. Pritchett called “human architecture,” lovely women in gauzy clothes, old trains clattering on mountainsides, the mirage of happiness; two, the dream state of travel itself. Often on a trip, I seem to be alive in a hallucinatory vision of difference, the highly colored unreality of foreignness, where I am vividly aware (as in most dreams) that I don’t belong; yet I am floating, an idle anonymous visitor among busy people, an utter stranger. When you’re strange, as the song goes, no one remembers your name.
Travel can induce such a distinct and nameless feeling of strangeness and disconnection in me that I feel insubstantial, like a puff of smoke, merely a ghost, a creepy revenant from the underworld, unobserved and watchful among real people, wandering, listening while remaining unseen. Being invisible — the usual condition of the older traveler — is much more useful than being obvious. You see more, you are not interrupted, you are ignored. Such a traveler isn’t in a hurry, which is why you might mistake him for a bum. Hating schedules, depending on chance encounters, I am attracted by travel’s slow tempo.
Ghosts have all the time in the world, another pleasure of long- distance aimlessness — traveling at half speed on slow trains and procrastinating. And this ghostliness, I was to find, was also an effect of the journey I had chosen, returning to places I had known many years ago. It is almost impossible to return to an early scene in your traveling life and not feel like a specter. And many places I saw were themselves sad and spectral, others big and hectic, while I was the haunting presence, the eavesdropping shadow on the ghost train.

Long after I took the trip I wrote about in The Great Railway Bazaar I went on thinking how I’d gone overland, changing trains across Asia, improvising my trip, rubbing against the world. And reflecting on what I’d seen — the way the unrevisited past is always looping in your dreams. Memory is a ghost train too. Ages later, you still ponder the beautiful face you once glimpsed in a distant country. Or the sight of a noble tree, or a country road, or a happy table in a café, or some angry boys armed with rusty spears shrieking, “Run you life, dim-dim!” — or the sound of a train at night, sounding that precise musical note of train whistles, a diminished third, into the darkness, as you lie in the train, moving through the world as travelers do, “inside the whale.” Thirty-three years went by. I was then twice as old as the person who had ridden those trains, most of them pulled by steam locomotives, boiling across the hinterland of Turkey and India. I loved the symmetry in the time difference. Time passing had become something serious to me, embodied in the process of my growing old. As a young man I regarded the earth as a fixed and trustworthy thing that would see me into my old age; but older, I began to understand transformation as a natural law, something emotional in an undependable world that was visibly spoiled. It is only with age that you acquire the gift to evaluate decay, the epiphany of Wordsworth, the wisdom of wabi-sabi: nothing is perfect, nothing is complete, nothing lasts.
“Without change there can be no nostalgia,” a friend once said to me, and I realized that what I began to witness was not just change and decay, but imminent extinction. Had my long-ago itinerary changed as much as me? I had the idea of taking the same trip again, traveling in my own footsteps — a serious enterprise, but the sort of trip that younger, opportunistic punks often take to make a book and get famous. (The list is very long and includes travelers’ books in the footsteps of Graham Greene, George Orwell, Robert Louis Stevenson, Leonard Woolf, Joseph Conrad, Mister Kurtz, H. M. Stanley, Leopold Bloom, Saint Paul, Basho, Jesus, and Buddha.) The best of travel seems to exist outside of time, as though the years of travel are not deducted from your life. Travel also holds the magical possibility of reinvention: that you might find a place you love, to begin a new life and never go home. In a distant place no one knows you — nearly always a plus. And you can pretend, in travel, to be different from the person you are, unattached, enigmatic, younger, richer or poorer, anyone you choose to be, the rebirth that many travelers experience if they go far enough.
The decision to return to any early scene in your life is dangerous but irresistible, not as a search for lost time but for the grotesquerie of what happened since. In most cases it is like meeting an old lover years later and hardly recognizing the object of desire in this funny-looking and bruised old fruit. We all live with fantasies of transformation. Live long enough and you see them enacted — the young made old, the road improved, houses where there were once fields; and their opposites, a good school turned into a ruin, a river poisoned, a pond shrunk and filled with trash, and dismal reports: “He’s dead,” “She’s huge,” “She committed suicide,” “He’s now prime minister,” “He’s in jail,” “You can’t go there anymore.” A great satisfaction in growing old — one of many — is assuming the role of a witness to the wobbling of the world and seeing irreversible changes. The downside, besides the tedium of listening to the delusions of the young, is hearing the same hackneyed opinions over and over, not just those of callow youth but, much worse and seemingly criminal, the opinions of even callower people who ought to know better, all the lies about war and fear and progress and the enemy — the world as a wheel of repetition. They — I should say “we” — are bored by things we’ve heard a million times before, books we’ve dismissed, the discoveries that are not new, the proposed solutions that will solve nothing. “I can tell that I am growing old,” says the narrator in Borges’s story “The Congress.” “One unmistakable sign is the fact that I find novelty neither interesting nor surprising, perhaps because I see nothing essentially new in it — it’s little more than timid variations on what’s already been.” Older people are perceived as cynics and misanthropes — but no, they are simply people who have at last heard the still, sad music of humanity played by an inferior rock band howling for fame. Going back and retracing my footsteps — a glib, debunking effort for a shallower, younger, impressionable writer — would be for me a way of seeing who I was, where I went, and what subsequently happened to the places I had seen.
Since I will never write the autobiography I once envisioned — volume one, Who I Was; volume two, I Told You So — writing about travel has become a way of making sense of my life, the nearest I will come to autobiography — as the novel is, the short story, and the essay. As Pedro Almodóvar once remarked, “Anything that is not autobiography is plagiarism.” The thing to avoid while in my own footsteps would be the tedious reminiscences of better days, the twittering of the nostalgia bore, whose message is usually I was there and you weren’t. “I remember when you could get four of those for a dollar.” “There was a big tree in a field where that building is now.” “In my day . . .” Oh, shut up!

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0547237936
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Mariner Books; Reprint edition (August 6, 2009)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 512 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780547237930
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0547237930
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 13.9 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.31 x 1.23 x 8 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #134,533 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #22 in Railroad Travel Reference
- #61 in General Asia Travel Books
- #335 in Travelogues & Travel Essays

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Paul Theroux

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Paul Theroux was born and educated in the United States. After graduating from university in 1963, he travelled first to Italy and then to Africa, where he worked as a Peace Corps teacher at a bush school in Malawi, and as a lecturer at Makerere University in Uganda. In 1968 he joined the University of Singapore and taught in the Department of English for three years. Throughout this time he was publishing short stories and journalism, and wrote a number of novels. Among these were Fong and the Indians, Girls at Play and Jungle Lovers, all of which appear in one volume, On the Edge of the Great Rift (Penguin, 1996).

In the early 1970s Paul Theroux moved with his wife and two children to Dorset, where he wrote Saint Jack, and then on to London. He was a resident in Britain for a total of seventeen years. In this time he wrote a dozen volumes of highly praised fiction and a number of successful travel books, from which a selection of writings were taken to compile his book Travelling the World (Penguin, 1992). Paul Theroux has now returned to the United States, but he continues to travel widely.

Paul Theroux's many books include Picture Palace, which won the 1978 Whitbread Literary Award; The Mosquito Coast, which was the 1981 Yorkshire Post Novel of the Year and joint winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was also made into a feature film; Riding the Iron Rooster, which won the 1988 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award; The Pillars of Hercules, shortlisted for the 1996 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award; My Other Life: A Novel, Kowloon Tong, Sir Vidia's Shadow, Fresh-air Fiend and Hotel Honolulu. Blindness is his latest novel. Most of his books are published by Penguin.

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K. N. Grieshaber

Gonna take a sentimental journey

Reviewed in the United States on May 25, 2013

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I loved that Paul Theroux, a man whose name is recognized by everyone in the fiction and non fiction fields, decided to basically recreate a journey he took when he was in his twenties and had no money. For criticism I have to say it is a huge amount of territory to cover, going from London to Japan by train, basically. A person can only observe so much of each country, and so there are bound to be natives of that country who disagree with the snapshot taken on that day(s). The book was written in 2006 when Bush was President and the war with Iraq was going on.
It was brave of Paul Theroux, who was a literary "darling" for a while there-- Mosquito Coast definitely made his name-- to even travel to these areas where there is unrest, terrorism, instability and face it-- real danger. In a way all of us sitting back in the comfort of mostly safe America are living vicariously through these observations.
Theroux has always had an edge to his writing, some elements of danger and sexuality, that keep his novels and articles interesting. He's simply a divinely gifted storyteller. He does not fail here, although the task of this extremely hard journey sometimes gets a tad tedious. For an older guy who is already world famous to mostly bunk in shared compartments on trains with --whoever!-- share bathrooms, eat native cuisine, and fake it till you make it with language barriers-- well it's amazing that he even took on this task. He is mostly good natured, but he hates missionaries, he hates but expects hustlers ( taxicab rip-offs, for instance) and he likes to take the native stance of disliking his own country, (the ugly American )sometimes. When you read about the bombings of Japan and Vietnam, you feel their side of the story. Even though Japan "started" it-- my words, not Paul's-- you feel a terrible disgrace at war itself and how history, architecture, spiritual temples, and humankind, can be just forever lost because of this brutality ( no matter whose "side" you were on.)
Of course my favorite parts were vignettes about specific people. I like knowing what Zoroastrians were like, or rickshaw operators, or Siberian prisons, or the new Vietnam. I love the monk who shared his compartment. I love his descriptions of Istanbul and Singapore, and the serenity ( mostly) of Japan. I love the comic book culture part of Japan. Despots and dictators are exposed for what they did to their countries. The book makes you thank your stars that you live in a democracy ( at least I do) even though many think our system is flawed. In other words, yes, read the book to know how damn lucky you really are !!
As a woman I could not identify with as many sexual come-ons he received. But I imagine a Westerner man would receive this many in countries like Thailand which are known for a sexual Disneyland atmosphere. The children in the sex trade-- where Theroux walks down a dark road to a secret hiding place, is a heartbreaking story. The author, who is married and wants to remain faithful to his wife, tells these stories for the sake of knowledge, and does not ever accept solicitations from the various available women around the world.
I enjoyed reading the book on Kindle because some of the Eastern references could be easily looked up with the instant Kindle dictionary. Sadly, this applied to other words which I had forgotten the meanings of, but Mr. Theroux has an excellent and not pretentious vocabulary.
In short I loved the book because it is specific in details about countries, has excellent stories and conveys a basic sense of the countries he visited.
In reading the other reviews I saw that some people think he is a hypocrite for "riding the rails" and then calling a famous friend to chat with or arrange to give a talk. I am glad he took advantage of his contacts and I think it makes the book more interesting that he sometimes has translators available or someone to show him around, rather than just arrive and be at the mercy of a tour guide book. He has earned the right to show off a bit, but I think he keeps to the spirit of the original back packer he was back in the seventies.
I am a fan. I rate it five stars.

21 people found this helpful

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USAF Veteran

Asia by train: Part Two

Reviewed in the United States on December 27, 2008

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Well known novelist ( The Mosquito Coast ) and travel writer ( Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Capetown (see my review), The Great Railway Bazaar , and others) Paul Theroux writes of a meandering journey starting from Western Europe, mostly by train, counter-clockwise around Asia. Theroux had made this trip (with a few differences) in a previous book, The Great Railway Bazaar, 30 years ago.

Theroux is one of the great living travel writers and is known for being opinionated and selective in his narratives. Theroux is anything but a disinterested observer. His books include frequent references to himself and are mostly about his interactions with various people in the places to which he has travelled. Theroux has his blind spots that show up and he has his flashes of insight in equal amounts. He does not try to be encyclopedic or even pretend to give contrary views. At times, this is irritating and high-handed - especially when he contradicts your own rigidly-held opinionated views. But isn't that why we read - To see places and situations through other's eyes and maybe even learn something new or think something different? So this opinionation is one of the motifs that drive Theroux's books and make them so interesting.

Even so, Theroux has mellowed with age and a happy marriage and I found that even when disagreeing with him, Theroux didn't have as much of the old vindictiveness, with a few exceptions. One is a hard-to-understand belief that Communists were the good guys in the cold war. For example, he compares Stalin's repressions (killing millions and imprisoning millions) to Senator Joseph McCarthy trying to expose the extensive Soviet spy network entrenched in the US government. McCarthy never accused anyone without cause and wielded no power. I recommend Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies for the current views on the tragic patriot Senator McCarthy. Theroux also has strange soft spots for Pol Pot and Ho Chi Minh - likewise mass murderers. Theroux apparently was a '60's protester and still carries some of these ridiculous beliefs. The Vietnam war came because Russia and China, via their puppet terrorist Ho, were intent on overthrowing South Vietnam via terror. Noted Author Bernard Fall records that the Communists assassinated 30 South Vietnamese officials like village chiefs and post-men daily for years - literally thousands of assassinations. Theroux conveniently ignores this as he notes the rare American atrocities.

These 2 errors aside, I found the rest of the book incredibly entertaining and insightful. Importantly, Theroux travels alone so he can meet the locals and interact rather than commenting on his travel companion's idiosyncracies like so many others. Theroux covers Eastern Europe briefly and Turkey, several of the Stans and particularly India in more depth. Theroux dislikes India due to its squalor, greed, dense population and lack of compassion for the poor. He notes that the advancement of India consists of abusing the poor to provide cheap but educated labor for multi-national concerns.

South-east Asia, Japan and Russia make up the rest of the book with occasional mentions of disliking China for the same reasons he dislikes India.

Theroux often includes a bon mot that is as entertaining as it is illuminating. For example, "Hands that help are better than lips that pray" - a saying from an Indian savant - perfectly expresses Theroux's disdain for much of the religious missionary work that goes on in these benighted countries. Or when Theroux notes that the call-bank girls in India hate calling the Aussies because the men so often start asking the girls what they are wearing and turn the call into a free sex call. (Which sounds like the perfect way to respond to a spam call during dinner - Why didn't I ever think of that?)

Theroux notes the evils in the places he visits and often juxtaposes them with evils in our own society, and I suspect that it is this that so unnerves many of his detractors.

Overall an excellent, entertaining, thought-provoking book with a few quibbles as noted. Four stars, but not quite five.

10 people found this helpful

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Kathy in CA

Immensely enjoyable!

Reviewed in the United States on October 18, 2013

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This was my first book by Paul Theroux, so I didn't know what to expect. I was so pleasantly surprised, and I know it certainly won't be my last book by this author.

Theroux travels in a very unique way, by rail, by himself. He does not set his sights on tourist meccas, but instead travels to places I vaguely remember hearing of, places I really never heard of, or places I would never in my wildest dreams pick as vacation destination sights. Yet, sitting back in bed each night, I could not get enough of each of his adventures and descriptions and thoughts.

Theroux attempted to revisit many of the places he had been to on a railway trip over thirty years earlier, to see what had changed and what had remained the same. He would speak to everyday people who traveled with him on the train or with folks he met at train stations or cities he was visiting. Often, he would strike up a conversation with a man who appeared to be of a similar age to himself. In this way, he was able to give the reader a feeling of what everyday life was like in the city and perhaps what changes had occurred over time. Theroux has mastered the art of asking questions of everyday folks and making them want to share their lives and experiences.

I know I am not doing justice here, as I am at a loss to how to describe this book and why I loved it so much. Theroux tells it as it is, as he sees it. What he says makes sense to me. He doesn't candy coat anything. And yet, he doesn't come off as a curmudgeon in my view. I can't wait to read another Theroux book. If you haven't experienced Theroux, you need to now!

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Top reviews from other countries

Amazon Customer

A great yarn

Reviewed in Canada on December 31, 2021

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Wonderful writer.

ANURAG

Good read

Reviewed in India on March 21, 2019

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Another good book from the author.

Sudhir Iyer

Train traveler's delight

Reviewed in Australia on March 2, 2017

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If you like travelling by train then read on. Just as his earlier book -The Great Railway Bazaar- about the same route in 1970s did this book too leaves you with a "travelled" feeling. You too would get off Paul's train as I did on turning the last page.

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kkbs

old trails

Reviewed in Germany on April 12, 2010

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This is again a really good and readable book by Paul Theroux, whom I deem to be one of the best contemporary travel writers. Although you can sometimes feel that the author is annoyed by certain fellow travellers, I still had the feeling that Theroux is getting a little milder with the years. He is, however, uneasy about the booming Asian superpowers: India is too crowded to be comfortable, and China is not worth travelling at all (which I feel is a little exaggerated). In any case, the mixture of places where hardly anybody travels for fun, like Turkmenistan, and touristy places like Thailand makes the book really vivid.
Another aspect really worth reading is the contrasting of impressions of his first, classical train journey to (nearly) the same places in the 70's ( The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train Through Asia (Penguin Modern Classics) ) with those of his actual journey, whether personal considerations or concerning his travel destinations.

Bill Dean

A master at the height of his powers

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 20, 2008

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Ever since I accidentally came across his work as a teenager in the mid-1990s, picking up a copy of his novel `My Other Life' at a book sale and being immediately drawn to its ambition and clarity of prose, Paul Theroux has been a hero of mine. His work has been an inspiration as I made my own way as an author and journalist, simultaneously delighting and depressing me - the former because he is so good, the latter because I doubt I will ever match his talent. Like a literary groupie I have read his every word, looking forward to each new release.

While his novels are always enjoyable - and some, such as `The Mosquito Coast' and `Milroy The Magician' can be described modern classics - I believe it is the narrative non-fiction and travel writing that is the strongest in his long portfolio, the sort of work that maybe bestows greatness upon him as a writer. He is entertaining, incisive, funny; and writes with beautiful clarity, seemingly incapable of putting a dull word on the page. While I sometimes disagree with his portrayal of places I have myself visited, he always seems to capture the essence of a place in a certain time.

Theroux's widely acknowledged travel classic is `The Great Railway Bazaar' his 1973 journey from London, through Europe and Asia and back again. It is a sort of journey without purpose or aim, a meditation on the wonders of rail. It is darkly funny, and tells of a world that no longer exists: Soviet Eastern Europe; Shahist Iran; an Afghanistan that is still on the hippy trail; war-riddled Vietnam; Communist Russia. So much has changed since then that it seemed inevitable that Theroux would eventually go back, and that he has done in `Ghost Train to the Eastern Star.'

I found it instructive and entertaining to re-read his 1970s classic with the new volume to see for myself how the world had changed, but also how Theroux had evolved as a writer (less funny, more contemplative, less likely to jump to the hasty conclusions he criticises other writers for; still a charming, erudite and likeable guide).

At 66 he is twice as old as when he embarked on The Great Railway Bazaar. The World has changed: He was refused a visa for Iran, told Afghanistan was too dangerous to visit; but he can stop en route in former-Soviet Republics, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan; visit North Vietnam; stop off on the Trans-Siberian route at Perm.

As a reader these places seem less foreign or strange even than they did when I first read The Great Railway Bazaar in the 1990s. While his accounts are, perhaps, less revelatory he is still perceptive and entertaining. He delights in seeing countries `with their pants down' and seeks out red light districts, sex shops, dodgy bars and other dives. An encounter with a Ukrainian prostitute in Turkey is particularly heart-breaking in its sadness.

Occasionally he interviews or meets up with other celebrated authors: Orhan Pamuk in Turkey, Haruki Murakami in Tokyo and the late Arthur C Clarke in Sri Lanka, the latter wearing a T-shirt saying, `I invented the satellite and all I got was this lousy T-shirt'. These add colour to his travels, but as pieces of journalism tacked on to the narrative they are marvelous and seem to transcend the ordinary literary interview. Perhaps this is because he finds his subjects in their natural arena.

The Great Railway Bazaar is referred back to regularly. Theroux fills in some of the blank spaces of that trip: he was terribly home sick and aware of his wife having an extra-marital affair whilst he conducted that first trip, but this was ignored (for obvious reasons) in the first book (save for a dream he has on the Trans Siberian Express that hints at his wife's unhappiness and perhaps her vindictiveness too). At the same time, I felt by reading the two books concurrently I learnt more than he told me.

Which brings me on to my principle niggle with Theroux, which is the sense, sometimes, that he isn't always being straight with the reader, that he is somehow playing games. He admits that a passage in The Great Railway Bazaar, where he met an aged hotel manager on a train, was largely fabricated (he transplanted the conversation to a train carriage to add to its dramatic appeal, he said) and you wonder where else he has been economical with the truth. Why is his second wife, Sheila Donnelly, referred to as Penelope? Is she really at home (in Hawaii) knitting? His first wife Anne is referenced often, but I don't think in any of his work he's ever mentioned his sons as adults, the novelist Marcel Theroux, and TV documentary maker and goofball, Louis. I think there's a side to Theroux which we will never see, unless his first wife - as has often been rumored - brings out her memoir of life with the writer.

But all this is digression. Ghost Train to The Eastern Star is a wonderful travel book - lyrical, funny, meditative - and the best I've read in years. Possibly it is Theroux's greatest work. But don't read it on its own, though; read it with The Great Railway Bazaar, chapter by chapter and appreciate how the world, and Paul Theroux, have changed.

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