Making Tracks

By Paul Gray

THE GREAT RAILWAY BAZAAR

by PAUL THEROUX 342 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $10.

Why not take as many trains as possible from London to Tokyo--including a few spur lines of the moment--and then back again? This notion would no doubt horrify the hapless U.S. rail commuter and send him reeling back to the bar car. Yet in late 1973 Novelist Paul Theroux 35, spent four months chugging over just such an odyssey. Surprisingly, he not only survived but entertainingly tells the tale.

First he explains the mania that provoked him. Like such disparate figures as Molly Bloom and Richard Nixon, Theroux says he has always been lured by the siren song of a train whistle: "I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it." Thus his trip represented a once-in-a-lifetime act of massive self-indulgence, plus the chance to experience firsthand "the trains with the bewitching names: the Orient Express, the North Star, the Trans-Siberian." As an added bonus, the trips threw him together with several novels' worth of offbeat characters.

There is the Kindly Burmese bound for Maymyo who offers Theroux fried sparrows for lunch. On the way to Kyoto, he meets a Japanese professor whose specialty is teaching a two-year course on Henry James' The Golden Bowl. Depressed by the breadlines in Sri Lanka (Ceylon) he is reassured by a chauvinist from Calcutta: "You call those bread queues? In Calcutta, we have bread queues twice as long as that." During the long, icy trip across Siberia, Theroux is befriended by a Russian who wants to hear all about North American hockey teams, including the "Bostabroons, Do-ront Mupplekhleef, Mondroolkanadeens and Cheegago Blekaks."

Whooshing from airport to similar airport, jet travelers usually find the world a pretty homogeneous place. Theroux destroys this illusion. His often snail-like pace (one local in southern India makes 94 stops) gives him the not always pleasant chance to sniff out local differences. "The first condition of understanding a foreign country," T.S. Eliot once wrote, "is to smell it," and Theroux misses nothing, from the burned coal that permeates Indian train stations to the poisonous industrial fumes of Osaka.

Like the different countries they transverse, the trains range abruptly from luxurious to primitive. Passengers, food and the scenery change each day in slow, unwinding diversity. "Looking out a train window in Asia," Theroux writes, "is like watching an unedited travelogue without the obnoxious sound track." Yet his own sound track is anything but that. Perhaps not since Mark 3 Twain's Following the Equator (1897) DEG have a wanderer's leisurely impressions 3 been hammered into such wry, incisive DEG mots. Venice sits on its industrialized gulf "like a drawing room in a gas station"; small villages in Malaysia roll by: "Bidor, Trolak, Tapah and Klang -- names like science fiction planets."

By word and the seat of his pants, Theroux has paid nostalgic homage to the pre-jet era, when men optimistically hoped to bind up the world with bands of steel. He also offers a reminder of how close they came to succeeding. If people rarely have the time, inclination or endurance to travel this way any more, Theroux suggests, the loss is theirs. To see the world slowly is to see oneself clearly. "After all," he concludes, "the grand tour is just the inspired man's way of heading home."

Paul Gray

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