Archive - March 24, 2023

Sally Howard Wed, March 22, 2023      The democratisation of world travel has its downsides. Paul Theroux, that most celebrated of postwar travel writers, is often ­collared by readers who have read his landmark works – The Great Railway Bazaar, which recounts Theroux’s 1972 journey by rail from Great Britain to Japan, for example; or Riding the Iron Rooster, on his clattering passage through 1980s China to Tibet – and found his accounts at odds with their own experience of, say, a resort-­littered Kenyan coastline, or a ­modern-day ­Singapore awash with super-malls and 7-Elevens. “Readers will say to me, ‘Well, you know, I went there and it wasn’t like that’,” Theroux tells me from his home in Hawaii, where I’ve interrupted the venerable writer feeding his gaggle of pet geese. “What they forget,” he continues, “is that these books are his­torical artefacts. In the case of The Old Patagonian Express, I . . .