All Aboard the Great Railway Bazaar: The Journey Is the Goal

All Aboard the Great Railway Bazaar: The Journey Is the Goal Have you ever heard a train whistle in the distance and felt an ache to be on board? Paul Theroux knew that feeling all his life. Ever since childhood, living within earshot of the Boston and Maine railroad, he had seldom heard a train go by without wishing he was on it. And in The Great Railway Bazaar, he finally answered that call — with one of the most ambitious journeys in travel literature. His plan was audacious in its simplicity: to board every train that chugged into view, from Victoria Station in London all the way to Tokyo Central. Why trains? For Theroux, the answer was almost philosophical. Trains, he wrote, are irresistible bazaars — snaking along perfectly level no matter what the landscape, improving your mood with speed, and never upsetting your drink. Compare that to what he called the anxious sweats of doom that aeroplanes inspire, or the nauseating sickness of the long-distance bus. On a train, anything is possible — a great meal, a binge, a visit from card players, an intrigue, a good night's sleep, and strangers' monologues framed like Russian short stories. He even quoted the English novelist Michael Frayn, who rephrased McLuhan to say the journey is the goal. And so the journey begins, rumbling through Clapham and out of a grey, sodden London. Watch through the window with him as England unfolds — tunnels giving way to open meadows, cows cropping grass, farmers haying in blue jackets. Schoolboys in dark blue blazers smirk on the platform at Tonbridge, and the train races by, taking their smirks away. Past hopfields that give Kent a Mediterranean tangle in September. Past a gypsy camp of fourteen battered caravans. Theroux noticed everything, even a housing estate's laundry line, where socks and bonnets formed an elaborate message, like signal flags on a distressed convoy. At Folkestone, something remarkable happened. As the train reached the edge of England, the passengers seemed to shed their reserve. Italians raised their voices. Nigerian travelers became vocal in Yoruba. Each passenger, Theroux observed, migrated to his own language, leaving the British muttering and averting their eyes. He himself was nursing a cold caught in the first September chill — and that cold made leaving easier. As he put it: Have you tried aspirin? No, I think I'll go to India. Across the Channel, at Calais, the Paris Express stood floodlit in the darkness. Then came the moment every rail romantic dreams of — joining the Orient Express, the most famous train in the world. Its itinerary read like poetry: Paris, Lausanne, Milano, Trieste, Zagreb, Beograd, Sofiya, Istanbul. This was the train hallowed by fiction — restless Lady Chatterley took it, so did Hercule Poirot and James Bond. Graham Greene sent his prowling unbelievers aboard even before taking it himself. But here is the delicious irony. The legendary train was, in Theroux's words, really murder. His compartment was a cramped two-berth closet with an intruding ladder. There was no dining car. And he had company — an elderly man named Duffill, who had first taken this train in 1929, and who Theroux dryly suspected was riding the very same carriage decades later. His fellow travelers were a gallery of characters: a Belgian girl of extraordinary size, a French woman who dismissed Istanbul with a repeated sale — dirty — and a memorable figure called Molesworth, an actors' agent with a magnifying glass on a chain, who never touched water on trains and poured Theroux a very drinkable Chablis. Molesworth had once been in the Indian army, organizing shows for the troops — he had even arranged Noël Coward's tour of India in 1946. The next morning brought the Alps, dappled with sunlight — the first sun Theroux had seen in days. And remarkably, that sun would keep shining for the next two months, all the way to southern India, until the late monsoon of Madras. Meanwhile, the small comedies continued: an American couple hunting desperately for a dining car that didn't exist, misled by the shrieking of mischievous Swiss boys, which they had mistaken for a breakfast call. As Theroux wryly noted, hunger's ear is not finely tuned. And that, perhaps, is the great secret of this book. The romance of the rails is real — but it lives not in luxury or legend. It lives in burned fish and overpriced meals, in strangers sharing Chablis, in an old man's watch dial swinging like a pendulum in the dark. Theroux wrote that if a train is large and comfortable, you don't even need a destination. Better to go first class than to arrive. The journey, after all, is the goal.