"The Great Railway Bazaar"

Frank Muller gets to do a great number of accents in this audiobook. As the narrator, his voice is often world-weary and dyspeptic, so I took the author to be an Englishman at first, but the section on Vietnam revealed his true nationality. Paul Theroux skirted around sexual tourism but got very close. More than the datedness, it was the maleness of this book that struck me.

• It was my intention to board every train that chugged into view from Victoria Station in London to Tokyo Central; to take the branch line to Simla, the spur through the Khyber Pass, and the chord line that links Indian Railways with those in Ceylon; the Mandalay Express, the Malaysian Golden Arrow, the locals in Vietnam, and the trains with bewitching names, the Orient Express, the North Star, the Trans-Siberian. I sought trains; I found passengers.
• grey-haired English couples who appeared to be embarking, with armloads of novels, on expensive literary adulteries.
• forty feet away, the perimeter of a housing estate with lots of interesting clothes on the line: plus fours, long Johns, snapping black brassieres, the pennants of bonnets and socks, all forming an elaborate message, like signal flags on the distressed convoy of those houses.
• The Nigerian lady leaned over and read the station sign: 'Frockystoon.' Her mispronunciation was like sarcasm and she looked as unimpressed as Trollope's Lady Glencora ('there was nothing she wanted so much as to see Folkestone').
• The Alps were rising, and in the sheerest places wide-roofed chalets were planted, as close to the ground as mushrooms and clustered in the same way at various distances from gravity-defying churches. Many of the valleys were dark, the sun showing only farther up on cliff faces and at the summits. At ground level the train passed fruit farms and clean villages and Swiss cycling in kerchiefs, calendar scenes that you admire for a moment before feeling an urge to move on to a new month.
• I said good night and went to bed to read Little Dorrit. I found some inspiration in Mr Meagles' saying, 'One always begins to forgive a place as soon as it's left behind,'
• As the days passed I slowed down and, with Nagel's Turkey in my hand, began sightseeing, an activity that delights the truly idle because it seems so much like scholarship, gawping and eavesdropping on antiquity, flattering oneself with the notion that one is discovering the past when really one is inventing it, using a guidebook as a scenario of swift notations.
• The face has become emblematic, the shape of a softening star, with the suggestions of a nose and chin, and is ubiquitous as the simplified character the Chinese use to frighten devils away. Atatiirk came to power in 1923, declared Turkey a republic, and, by way of modernization, closed down all religious schools, dissolved dervish orders, and introduced the Latin alphabet and the Swiss civil code. He died in 1938, and that was my insight: modernization stopped in Turkey with the death of Atatiirk, at five minutes past nine on 10 November 1938.
• 'The ashram?' Auroville, a kind of spiritual Levittown dedicated to the memory of Sri Aurobindo and at that time ruled over by his ninety-year-old French mistress (the 'Mother'), is located near Pondicherry, in South India.
  'Yes. I want to stay there as long as possible.'
  'How long?'
  'Years.' He regarded a passing village and nodded. 'If they let me.'
  It was the tone of a man who tells you, with a mixture of piety and arrogance, that he has a vocation. But Moto-Guzzi had a wife and children in California. Interesting: he had fled his children and some of the girls in his group had fled their parents.
• It was after the historical Tamerlane defeated Bayezid at the Battle of Angora (1402) that Caesarea was annexed; then it was occupied by the Mamelukes and in the sixteenth century became part of the Ottoman Empire. But dust does not hold the footprints of conquerors, and not even the bright name of Tamerlane makes this monotonous-looking town interesting.
• The conversation, like many others I had with people on trains, derived an easy candour from the shared journey, the comfort of the dining car, and the certain knowledge that neither of us would see each other again. The railway was a fictor's bazaar, in which anyone with the patience could carry away a memory to pore over in privacy. The memories were inconclusive, but an ending, as in the best fiction, was always implied. The sad engineer would never go back to England; he would become one of these elderly expatriates who hide out in remote countries, with odd sympathies, a weakness for the local religion, an unreasonable anger, and the kind of total recall that drives curious strangers away.
• Behind us the sun had dropped low, and the peaks of the Khyber Pass were mauve in a lilac haze so lovely it looked scented.
• Looking out a train window in Asia is like watching an unedited travelogue without the obnoxious soundtrack: I had to guess at the purpose of activities - people patting pie-shaped turds and slapping them on to the side of a mud hut to dry; men with bullocks and submerged ploughs, preparing a rice field for planting; and at Badami Bagh, just outside Lahore, a town of grass huts, cardboard shelters, pup tents, and hovels of paper, twigs, and cloth, everyone was in motion - sorting fruit, folding clothes, fanning the fire, shooing a dog away, mending a roof. It is the industry of the poor in the morning, so busy they look hopeful, but it is deceptive. The position of their settlement gives them away; this is the extreme of poverty, the shantytown by the railway tracks.
• To understand the real India, the Indians say, you must go to the villages. But that is not strictly true, because the Indians have carried their villages to the railway stations. In the daytime it is not apparent - you might mistake any of these people for beggars, ticketless travellers (sign: TICKETLESS TRAVEL is A SOCIAL EVIL), or unlicensed hawkers. At night and in the early morning the station village is complete, a community so preoccupied that the thousands of passengers arriving and departing leave it undisturbed: they detour around it. The railway dwellers possess the station, but only the new arrival notices this. He feels something is wrong because he has not learned the Indian habit of ignoring the obvious, making a detour to preserve his calm. The newcomer cannot believe he has been plunged into such intimacy so soon.
• But the station village is all interior, and the shock of this exposure made me hurry away. I didn't feel I had any right to watch people bathing under a low faucet -naked among the incoming tide of office workers; men sleeping late on their charpoys or tucking up their turbans; women with nose rings and cracked yellow feet cooking stews of begged vegetables over smoky fires, suckling infants, folding bedrolls; children pissing on their toes; little girls, in oversized frocks falling from their shoulders, fetching water in tin cans from the third-class toilet; and, near a newspaper vendor, a man lying on his back, holding a baby up to admire and tickling it. Hard work, poor pleasures, and the scrimmage of appetite.
• These hours were fixed a hundred years ago, when Simla was the summer capital of the Indian empire, and they have not varied. The architecture is similarly unchanged - it is all high Victorian, with the vulgarly grandiose touches colonial labour allowed, extravagant gutters and porticoes, buttressed by pillars and steelwork to prevent its slipping down the hill.
• 'Where do you live?' asked a small friendly ashramite, who was eating an apple. (Simla apples are delicious, but, because of a trade agreement, the whole crop goes to Poland.)
• Blitz is a noisy, irresponsible weekly paper in English that retails scandals in a semiliterate but bouncy style of which the following, from the film page, is a fair example:
  Star-producer-director of JUHU, one of four bhais, hotted up his birthday like nobody's business.
• (cover your good eye, squint at Victoria Station in Bombay, and you see the grey majesty of St Paul's Cathedral). Bombay fulfils the big-city requirements of age, depth, and frenzy, inspiring a chauvinism in its inhabitants, a threadbare metropolitan hauteur rivalled only by Calcutta.
• sight-seeing was a way of passing the time, but, as I had concluded in Istanbul, it was an activity very largely based on imaginative invention, like rehearsing your own play in stage sets from which all the actors had fled.
• The windows of my hotel room were open; I could smell sweet flowers. The odour sang as I read Exiles: 'I am sure that no law made by man is sacred before the impulse of passion... There is no law before impulse.' The perfume was familiar; it was jasmine. I thought of the girls, laughing there in that hut, wearing the white flowers with such narrow petals.
• It was another example of Ceylonese improvidence. They dynamite coral from reefs and burn it to make lime. But the broken reef lets in the sea to erode the shore. The government had begun a programme to cement the reefs, but the paradox is that cement is made with lime, and, as no cement can be imported, the reefs that are dynamited for the lime to mend others must themselves be replaced. They call it the cement-industry; it is an industry that is entirely self-consuming: nothing is achieved.
• Then there were steeples, towers, belfries, shining vanes, and masts of ships: a very forest. Gables, housetops, garret-windows, wilderness upon wilderness. Smoke and noise enough for all the world at once.There is more, and it is all good, but I think I have quoted enough to show that the best description of Calcutta is Todgers' corner of London in Chapter IX of Martin Chuzzlewit. But having decided that Calcutta was Dickensian (perhaps more Dickensian than London ever was)
• Laos, a river bank, had been overrun and ransacked; it was one of America's expensive practical jokes, a motiveless place where nothing was made, everything imported; a kingdom with baffling pretensions to Frenchness. What was surprising was that it existed at all, and the more I thought of it, the more it seemed like a lower form of life, like the cross-eyed planarian or squashy amoeba, the sort of creature that can't die even when it is cut to ribbons.
• The trains in any country contain the essential paraphernalia of the culture: Thai trains have the shower jar with the glazed dragon on its side, Ceylonese ones the car reserved for Buddhist monks, Indian ones a vegetarian kitchen and six classes, Iranian ones prayer mats, Malaysian ones a noodle stall, Vietnamese ones bulletproof glass on the locomotive, and on every carriage of a Russian train there is a samovar. The railway bazaar, with its gadgets and passengers, represented the society so completely that to board it was to be challenged by the national character. At times it was like a leisurely seminar, but I also felt on some occasions that it was like being jailed and then assaulted by the monstrously typical.

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• I WENT TO Vietnam to take the train; people have done stranger things in that country. The Trans-Vietnam Railway, which the French called the Transindochinois, took over thirty-three years to build, but in 1942, a short six years after it was finished, it was blown to bits and never repaired. A colonial confection, like one of those French dishes that take ages to prepare and are devoured swiftly: a brief delicacy that is mostly labour and memory. The line went along the beautiful coast few of our reluctant janizaries have praised, from Saigon to Hanoi; but now it is in pieces, like a worm chopped up for bait, a section here and there twitching with signs of life.
• There were really two selling points, the beaches and the war. But the war was still on, in spite of the fact that nowhere in the forty-four-page booklet entitled Visit VietNam was fighting mentioned, except the oblique statement, 'English [language] is making rapid progress under the pressure of contemporary events',
• They were not crudely built squatters' shacks: these were small houses, built by contractors, whose existence had some official sanction. The houses with no drains. They were appropriate in a country where great roads led nowhere, where planes flew to no purpose, and the government was just another self-serving tyranny. The conventional view was that the Americans had been imperialists; but that is an inaccurate jibe. The American mission was purely sententious and military; nowhere was there evidence of the usual municipal preoccupations of a colonizing power - road-mending, drainage, or permanent buildings. In Saigon, the embassy and the Abraham Lincoln Library exhausted the services of the one architect who was sent in nine years. These two buildings will survive an offensive because that architect learned to incorporate a rocket-screen into a decorative feature of the outside wall - but this is not much of an achievement compared to the French-built post office, cathedral, the several schools, the solid clubs like the Cercle Sportif Saigonnais, and all the grand residences, of which Cobra One's was a fairly modest example... Planning and maintenance characterize even the briefest and most brutish empire; apart from the institution of a legal system there aren't many more imperial virtues. But Americans weren't pledged to maintain.
• The war had become not smaller, but less mechanized, less elaborate. Money and foreign troops had complicated it, but now the Vietnamese had reverted from the corporation-style hostilities of the Americans to the colonial superstructure, slower communications, a return to farming, housing in the old buildings, and a transport system based on the railway.
• Some watched the train, with their rifles at their shoulders, in those oversize uniforms - a metaphor of mismatching that never failed to remind me that these men - these boys - had been dressed and armed by much larger Americans. With the Americans gone the war looked too big, an uncalled-for size, really, like those shirts whose cuffs reached to the soldiers' knuckles and the helmets that fell over their eyes.
• but no picture could duplicate the complexity of the beauty: over there, the sun lighted a bomb scar in the forest, and next to it smoke filled the bowl of a valley; a column of rain from one fugitive cloud slanted on another slope, and the blue gave way to black green, to rice green on the flat fields of shoots, which became, after a strip of sand, an immensity of blue ocean. The distances were enormous and the landscape was so large it had to be studied in parts, like a mural seen by a child.
• We were at the fringes of a bay that was green and sparkling in bright sunlight. Beyond the leaping jade plates of the sea was an overhang of cliffs and the sight of a valley so large it contained sun, smoke, rain, and cloud - all at once - independent quantities of colour. I had been unprepared for this beauty; it surprised and humbled me in the same degree the emptiness had in rural India. Who has mentioned the simple fact that the heights of Vietnam are places of unimaginable grandeur? Though we can hardly blame a frightened draftee for not noticing this magnificence, we should have known all along that the French would not have colonized it, nor would the Americans have fought so long, if such ripeness did not invite the eye to take it.

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• Fruit is also inexpensive since Japan buys cut-price oranges, apples, and tangerines from the South Africans, who are so grateful to get radios in return, they have officially declared the Japanese to be white.
• At the enormous Isetan Department Store in Shinjuku, the groups of employees standing by display counters say, 'Good morning' to the first customers, making them feel like stock-holders. Everything works: the place spins with polite invention.
• There must be something in the Japanese character that saves them from the despair Americans feel in similar throes of consuming. The American, gorging himself on merchandise, develops a sense of guilty self-consciousness; if the Japanese have these doubts they do not show them. Perhaps hesitation is not part of the national character, or perhaps the ones who hesitate are trampled by the crowds of shoppers -that natural selection that capitalist society practises against the reflective.
• it had a pretentious chase, odd camera angles, and the kind of formal hysteria I had always associated with film-society offerings.
• Finally, she succeeded: she exhibited her blood-stained body to the reverential audience and then pushed the dripping blade into her throat, impaling her head like a lollipop on a stick. Blood shot to her jaws, and, much perforated, she swooned and fell flat.
• The odourless Japanese trains unnerved me and produced in me a sweaty tension I had always associated with plane travel. They brought back the symptoms of encapsulated terror I had felt in southern Thailand's International Express - a kind of leaden suspense that had stolen upon me after several months of travel. Travel -even in ideal conditions - had begun to make me anxious, and I saw that in various places the constant movement had separated me so completely from my surroundings that I might have been anywhere strange, nagged by the seamless guilt an unemployed person feels moving from failure to failure.
• 'Up to a point,' I said. 'But the one I saw wasn't a strip show. Sadists making love to masochists, nude suicides - I've never seen such blood! I really don't have the stomach for it. Have you ever been to Nichigeki Music Hall?'
  'Yes,' said Professor Toyama. 'That's nothing.'
  'Well, I don't find transfusions erotic, I'm sorry. I'd like to see the Japanese take sex out of the emergency ward.'
• But: all journeys were return journeys. The farther one travelled, the nakeder one got, until, towards the end, ceasing to be animated by any scene, one was most oneself, a man in a bed surrounded by empty bottles. The man who says, 'I've got a wife and kids' is far from home; at home he speaks of Japan. But he does not know - how could he? - that the scenes changing in the train window from Victoria Station to Tokyo Central are nothing compared to the change in himself; and travel writing, which cannot but be droll at the outset, moves from journalism to fiction, arriving as promptly as the Kodama Echo at autobiography. From there any further travel makes a beeline to confession, the embarrassed monologue in a deserted bazaar.
• 'I know a dealer in old prints,' I said, and began to tell them the most frightening story I know, 'The Mezzotint', by M. R. James.
• What was that? Sweet voices, as clear as organ tones, drifted from my compartment. I froze and listened. The Russians, awestruck by the sight of the Volga, had fallen silent; they were hunched, staring down at the water. But the holy music, fragrant and slight, moved through the air, warming it like an aroma.
  Where a mother laid her baby In a manger, for his bed...
  The hymn wavered, but the silent reverence of the Russians and the slowness of the train allowed the soft children's voices to perfume the corridor. My listening became a meditation of almost unbearable sadness, as if joy's highest refinement was borne on a needlepoint of pain.
  Mary was that mother mild, Jesus Christ, her little child...I went into the compartment and held the radio to my ear until the broadcast ended, a programme of Christmas music from the BBC. Dawn never came that day.
• And I had learned what I had always secretly believed, that the difference between travel writing and fiction is the difference between recording what the eye sees and discovering what the imagination knows. Fiction is pure joy - how sad that I could not reinvent the trip as fiction. It would have had (now we were boarding a blue ferry at the Hook) such a pleasing shape if I had artfully distributed light and shadow and played with the grammar of delay. I would have plotted myself into danger: Sadik would have had a switchblade and gold teeth, the Hue track an erupting mine, the Orient Express a lavish dining car, and Nina - imploring me - would have rapped softly on my compartment door and flung off her uniform as we crossed the Volga. It did not happen that way, and in any case I might have been too busy for that gusto. I had worked every day, bent over my rocking notebook like Trollope scribbling between postal assignments remembering to put it all in the past tense.
  Gladly, made nimble by sanity's seamless glee, I boarded the train for London.