ELITIST ON A GRAND TOUR

By John Elson

THERE IS A FUNDAMENTAL DIFFERence between tourists and travelers. Tourists know for certain where they are headed; travelers for the most part do not. By that standard, Paul Theroux is quintessentially a traveler. If serendipity were a god, he would be its most devoted acolyte.

In The Pillars of Hercules (Putnam; 509 pages; $27.50), Theroux records a grand tour of the Mediterranean, from Gibraltar to Tangier the long way around--that is to say, via the Spanish coast, Corsica, Albania and several points east, aboard wheezing buses, cranky trains and (once) a luxury cruise ship larded with rich Americans. Fans of previous Theroux travelogs like The Happy Isles of Oceania will relish some familiar ingredients. There is, for starters, his dazzling prose, which in a flick of a paragraph can shift from lowly growls of disgust to images of seascape with the allusive force of poetry.

Also present is the lofty misanthropy of an elitist who can write off entire countries with the toss of an aphorism. "The whole of Greece," he writes, "seemed to me a cut-price theme park of broken marble, a place where you were harangued in a high-minded way about Ancient Greek culture while some swarthy little person picked your pocket." Then there is Albania, with its blighted trees, hectoring beggars and vandalized shacks of houses. This Third World country in Europe's midst, Theroux notes, "was brutalized, as though a nasty-minded army had swept through, kicking it to bits."

Theroux speculates that as the Mediterranean's cities have grown larger physically, they have become smaller-minded and monoglot. Alexandria, as novelist Lawrence Durrell put it, was once home to "five races, five languages, a dozen creeds." Now it is a dull port of Arabic-speaking Arabs bound by one creed, Islam. Theroux finds the same dreary uniformity in other cities: "It was hard to imagine a black general named Othello living in Venice now," despite all the Senegalese selling trinkets near the Grand Canal.

Theroux's ethnic snobbery is a tired act by now, but his his eyes remain open to beauty as well as squalor. The sensuous Alexandria of old, he notes, was a city "so purple, with Nubian slaves, child brothels, and cabals and nearly always someone in the Casbah wailing with meningitis." One can almost forgive the racist undercurrents of a writer who can pen a sentence like that.