The Great Railway Bazaar

The Great Railway Bazaar Review

The Great Railway Bazaar is the book that invented modern travel writing as a genre — or at least defined its dominant mode. Published in 1975, it describes Paul Theroux’s four-month journey by train from London through Europe, Turkey, Iran, India, Southeast Asia, Japan, and back through the Trans-Siberian Railway. It made Theroux famous and established the template for the traveler-as-narrator persona that dominated travel writing for two decades: opinionated, literary, somewhat misanthropic, consistently interesting.

The journey itself is extraordinary by contemporary standards: Theroux catches the Orient Express, the Khyber Pass local, the Grand Trunk Express from Amritsar to Madras, the train from Colombo to Kandy, the Da Nang Express during the final months of American involvement in Vietnam, and eventually the Trans-Siberian all the way to Moscow. At each stop he encounters strangers, observes the landscape from the window, and reflects on what travel is and what it means to be a certain kind of Western man moving through a world he doesn’t fully understand.

The honesty about the self-absorption of travel is one of the book’s qualities — Theroux doesn’t pretend to deep understanding of the countries he passes through, and the persona he projects is not always likeable. He is grumpy about other travelers, occasionally condescending, sometimes frankly bored. This is more honest than the usual travel writer’s pretense of infinite curiosity and openness, and it produces a portrait of a particular kind of traveler — the literary Anglophone male of the mid-1970s — that has genuine documentary value alongside its literary pleasures.

The prose is consistently excellent, the observations often acute, and the cumulative portrait of Asia at a specific historical moment — between decolonization and the globalizing present — is something no other book provides in quite the same way.