TRAVEL: Ghost Train To The Eastern Star: On the Tracks of the Great Railway Bazaar By Paul TherouxPenguin, 485pp, £20
PAUL THEROUX is a canny writer. In his latest travel book, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, he reveals the truth about travel writing: "Most writing about travel takes the form of jumping to conclusions, and so most travel books are superfluous . . . Little better than a licence to bore, travel writing is the lowest form of literary self-indulgence: dishonest complaining, creative mendacity, pointless heroics and chronic posturing."
Thus are his critics disarmed as he gets in first and good luck to him. It's 34 years since the ground-breaking The Great Railway Bazaarwas published but with this latest book, Theroux shows that he can still hack it, even if the Theroux of today seems a lot more compassionate and, dare I say it, kindly than his younger self.
This could be something to do with the fact that while he was on the train journey that resulted in The Great Railway Bazaar, he discovered his wife was having an affair. It left him, he said, miserable and murderous. When I visited him in London, his then wife was nowhere to be seen and the atmosphere in the family house crackled with ice.
Now, in Ghost Train, he reveals his present wife told him that, during his absence, she would be doing a lot of knitting. It's a cosy image of the wait-at-home wife but since she is called Penelope, I couldn't help worrying on his behalf that she might have to drop some stitches during her husband's odyssean wanderings.
Both journeys, separated by 31 years, have many similarities: they are made mainly by rail, start and finish in London, cover some 28,000 miles and more or less follow the same itinerary through Asia via Russia and back again.
But is it the same journey? Decidedly not. Too much time has passed. On a train in Thailand, the backpacker opposite him is reading his novel, The Mosquito Coast, which was made into a film with Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren.
Leaning over to her, he asks: "Was it convincing?" and when she nods, he says he is the author.
"So I guess writing's your hobby?" she comments, before asking: "Were you influenced by The Poisonwood Bible?" - at which point he explains his book was written 12 years earlier.
This was a chance encounter, the sort that Theroux is so adept at exploiting. The slightest nod, smile or glare from someone and he's in there, building up a relationship that might last five minutes or five days but always bears fruit. On the train to Mandalay in Burma, he persuades a Buddhist monk to open his little bundle of earthly goods, wherein lies a rice bowl doubling as an alms bowl, a torch, mosquito cream, aspirin, thread, needles, cotton swabs, foot-fungus cream, lip balm and razors - for head shaving - and his ordination certificate. What about money? "That's my secret," replies the monk understandably, since while sleeping once, someone had slit his bag and stolen some of it. To meditate, he contemplates a pine-cone tree in front of a garden.
Theroux knows his Koran, his Buddhist teachings and his Bible, quoting from all three to his purpose while at the same time announcing he is an atheist.
But thankfully, his tolerance and ability to empathise are occasionally shattered by interventions from the younger Theroux. A train passenger annoys him with her hectoring phone conversation, so he tells us she is a gargoyle in horn-rimmed glasses who scratches her hairy arms and clearly annoys him so much that on one page she is a young woman but by the next page she has become middle-aged.
Romania he describes as a country used by the US military for torture of terrorist suspects and here he is as profane as ever: "We travelled across the flat plain . . . through the immense fields of wheat that, besides orphans, is Romania's main export."
Theroux's readability is due to many things and one is his erudition. A one-time university lecturer, he drops history or literary quotes into the narrative the way a cook might add a tantalising herb to an increasingly delicious dish, telling us about the Sassanids or the Sufis of Omdurman.
He's good on country profiles so that we get a potted but concise breakdown of how each country got to be where it is at that moment. His chatty manner makes him the same as the rest of us: when he finds himself in the same hotel in the Indian city of Jodhpur as Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall, he mentions she has a pot belly and when he phones his wife they talk about knitting patterns.
His descriptions are light but memorable: in London, "rain descended like a burden". When I interviewed him, so many years ago, he revealed that he never took photographs as that would get in the way of the words. "I had in my mind," he told me, "the image of a flight of birds across the sky in Venice which took me two years to describe."
The most poignant encounters are those in Cambodia. There, a B-52 bombing campaign in 1969-1970 killed some 600,000 people and yet Cambodians welcome him with dignity. His visit to a peaceful grove where birds were singing - one of the 343 killing fields - inevitably recalled a visit a few weeks earlier to a temple in Mandalay where "a young girl held on her knees a basket of shivering sparrows".
For 25 cents, he could buy one and set it free. He gave her a dollar and "she handed me one stupefied bird at a time and off each one went, chirping as they soared away".
Read this book: you will laugh, you may weep but you won't put it down.
Mary Russell's Journeys of a Lifetimeis published by Townhouse and Simon and Schuster