Escaping The Tyranny Of The Ordinary: Paul Theroux

Theroux continued to combine writing and teaching in Singapore before moving with Anne and their first son, Marcel, to the U.K., to live first in Dorset and then London, where their second son, Louis, whose celebrated broadcasting career has followed in his father’s curious-stranger mould, was born. Never at home in his wife’s homeland — he claimed to have hated London for the entire 17 years he lived there — Paul began almost at once to travel. His first grand tour was by train to Japan via Europe, the Middle East and Malaysia, and back by the Trans-Siberian Railway, the account of which, The Great Railway Bazaar, was published in 1975 and remains his defining work. 

His book was expansive, idiosyncratic, witty, absorbing and utterly fresh, but perhaps its greatest achievement, above even the infinite curiosity and perceptiveness it displayed, was the intimacy of Theroux’s tone. There was never any doubt in the reader’s mind that he was cleverer, more knowledgeable and more self-assured, but he was simply the best company anyone could imagine, his opinion and judgment always undercut with magnificent self-deprecation. “You think of travellers as bold,” he wrote in one key passage, “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.” 

Later travel books saw him continue on his beloved trains to South America (1979’s The Old Patagonian Express), walking through the U.K. (The Kingdom by the Sea, 1983), touring China (Riding the Iron Rooster, 1988), kayaking in the South Pacific (The Happy Isles of Oceania, 1992) and, turning his perpetual-foreigner’s eyes on his own land with particular acuity, the southern states of the U.S. (Deep South, 2015). Over almost 50 years, he has continued to avoid comfort. While most travel journalism is the diary of the underpaid and over-pampered, Theroux’s writing is the opposite, the art of a wealthy man who is slumming it for our benefit. As he became better known, he was forced to head into third class and “funky hotels” in order to avoid the world inhabited by his readers. From this came true travel writing, a connection with the ordinary, a taste of real life and what he calls “all these obvious things you find out by travelling slowly, in the laborious way on the ground, staying in fairly bad places but talking to people”. 

So often has he repeated the apparently offhand remark that the aim of his travel was “to get me away from my desk” or because “I had nothing to write”, it begins to seem at least half-true. Yet the other half was always a taste for danger and even disaster — escape from that tyranny of the ordinary. He cites his favourite book as Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s The Worst Journey In The World, a hilariously horrific account of an offshoot of Scott’s 1910 Antarctic expedition, and admires Wilfred Thesiger’s Arabian Sands, about living with the Bedouin, “wandering in the desert and having a terrible time”, as Theroux has it. As he said of the trip down the Nile that became 2002’s Dark Star Safari, “You don’t want to suffer. But it helps if you’re writing about it.” 

Beyond this, though, lies his innate subversiveness. This is much aided by his establishment aura, the air of the American professor he nearly was, with the horn-rimmed glasses and the tidy combed parting, ever present through the years. His looks, which are almost leading-man in their straightforward sculpting, were well served in the 1970s by a taste for turtlenecks and tweed and even a leaning towards broad-lapelled coats and corduroy that had something of the Yves Saint Laurent about them. Add to this the ability to carry off a Hawaiian shirt and a clear ease with crumpled linen, and you have the makings of an alternative pin-up. Beneath this veneer, though, sits a well of irony and even cynicism that surely tracks back to the great idealist — “angry and agitated”, as he remembers it — who joined the Peace Corps, the tarnished reverse side of that shiny coin. 

It’s this that brings us great lines such as, “Gain a modest reputation for being unreliable and you will never be asked to do a thing” and, “The least dignified thing that can happen to a man is to be murdered”. It’s behind the opening line of his rightly celebrated 2005 piece for The New York Times, entitled ‘The Rock Star’s Burden’: “There are probably more annoying things than being hectored about African development by a wealthy Irish rock star in a cowboy hat, but I can’t think of one at the moment.” Combine it with the open-minded idealism at its source, the desire to connect and understand, and you have the great gift that only the subversives bring us: the chance to see the world as it really is.