Word: train
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...placid place since it became an independent nation in 1947. After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, Islamabad, with U.S. and Saudi funding, sent thousands of men across the border to join Afghans in fighting the Soviets. The Pakistani military used religious schools in the borderland to train and equip Afghan mujahedin and to heal them when they returned. More than 3 million Afghan refugees took shelter in Pakistan's cities and in makeshift camps. But after the Soviets withdrew in 1989, the U.S. lost interest in the region. Afghanistan's war of liberation turned into a civil...
That's true even if you're Paul Theroux, arguably the dean of all living travel writers and certainly one of the most accomplished. In his latest, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, Theroux retraces the steps he took in his first notable travel book, The Great Railway Bazaar, published more than 30 years ago. Ghost Train's conceit is Theroux exploring not only how the places he visited back then have changed, but how he has as well. "The decision to return to any early scene in your life is dangerous but irresistible, not as a search for lost...
...Vincent eventually quit the call center and go to work for another company (or maybe found one, Theroux doesn't quite say) that makes low-cost shirts for big American brands like Kenneth Cole and Tommy Hilfiger. These guys are "exploited?'' They don't seem to be. Considering Ghost Train is supposed to hark back to the journey Theroux took three decades ago, we might get a better sense of whether or not Vidiadhar and Vincent are exploited if we knew what their parents' lives were like. But Theroux doesn't bother to find...
...there aren't enough of those moments. Instead, we get plenty of cringe-inducing inner ruminations (such as Theroux's particularly creepy thoughts on the inherent eroticism of the uniforms that female train-ticket attendants wear in Japan), and breathtaking generality - the best example of which is the bizarre rant at the very end. On the last page, Theroux writes this: "Most of the world is worsening, shrinking to a ball of bungled desolation. Only the old can really see how gracelessly the world is ageing and all that we have lost...
First, there's not a lot in the preceding pages to support Theroux's proclamation that the world is going to hell in a hand-basket. And second, anyone who thinks that about most of the places covered in Ghost Train is clearly not paying attention. The Cambodians, the Vietnamese, the Russians, the Indians - their world is "worsening?" Compared to 30 years ago? If Theroux actually believes that, it tells us more about the author, 30 years on, than the places he has visited...