The Great Railway Bazaar

The Great Railway Bazaar Review

The Great Railway Bazaar is the book that invented modern travel writing as a genre — or at least defined its dominant mode. Published in 1975, it describes Paul Theroux’s four-month journey by train from London through Europe, Turkey, Iran, India, Southeast Asia, Japan, and back through the Trans-Siberian Railway. It made Theroux famous and established the template for the traveler-as-narrator persona that dominated travel writing for two decades: opinionated, literary, somewhat misanthropic, consistently interesting.

The journey itself is extraordinary by contemporary standards: Theroux catches the Orient Express, the Khyber Pass local, the Grand Trunk Express from Amritsar to Madras, the train from Colombo to Kandy, the Da Nang Express during the final months of American involvement in Vietnam, and eventually the Trans-Siberian all the way to Moscow. At each stop he encounters strangers, observes the landscape from the window, and reflects on what travel is and what it means to be a certain kind of Western man moving through a world he doesn’t fully understand.

The honesty about the self-absorption of travel is one of the book’s qualities — Theroux doesn’t pretend to deep understanding of the countries he passes through, and the persona he projects is not always likeable. He is grumpy about other travelers, occasionally condescending, sometimes frankly bored. This is more honest than the usual travel writer’s pretense of infinite curiosity and openness, and it produces a portrait of a particular kind of traveler — the literary Anglophone male of the mid-1970s — that has genuine documentary value alongside its literary pleasures.

The prose is consistently excellent, the observations often acute, and the cumulative portrait of Asia at a specific historical moment — between decolonization and the globalizing present — is something no other book provides in quite the same way.

The Book That Created a Genre

It is hard to overstate how much The Great Railway Bazaar changed travel writing. Before it, the dominant mode was either the guidebook or the lyrical, reverent appreciation of foreign places. Theroux did something different: he made the journey itself — the trains, the compartments, the tedious waits, the irritating fellow passengers — the actual subject, and he put a sharp, fallible, often unlikeable narrator at the center of it. Written by a struggling novelist who hoped a long trip might shake loose a new book, it became a runaway bestseller, sold well over a million copies, and effectively founded the modern travelogue. Every wry, first-person, train-or-road narrative that followed — by Bill Bryson, Jan Morris, and Theroux’s own many sequels — owes something to the template he set here.

The Pleasures of a Difficult Narrator

The persona is the engine, and Theroux’s willingness to be unlikeable is exactly what keeps the book alive. He complains, he condescends, he tires of people, he can be acid about the very strangers he depends on for material. Where lesser travel writers perform an exhausting infinite curiosity, Theroux admits to boredom, homesickness, and irritation — and that honesty paradoxically makes him a more trustworthy witness. When he is delighted, you believe it; when he is appalled, you believe that too. The book’s funniest and sharpest passages come from this refusal to flatter either himself or the places he passes through. It is a deliberately partial portrait, and it tells you so.

Asia at a Hinge Moment

The historical value has only grown with time. Theroux made the trip in 1973, and the world he documents is one that has largely vanished: he rides the original Orient Express in its shabby decline, crosses an Iran still under the Shah, passes through an India a generation removed from independence, and catches a train in Vietnam during the last months of American involvement, the war still audible in the background. Seen from fifty years on, the book is an inadvertent time capsule — a record of a slower, more dangerous, less connected Asia caught in the moment before mass tourism and globalization remade it. Some of Theroux’s attitudes have dated, reflecting the assumptions of a 1970s Western man, and a fair reading has to acknowledge that. But the snapshot he captured is irreplaceable.

The Sour Homecoming

The journey ends not in triumph but in exhaustion. By the time Theroux boards the Trans-Siberian for the long haul back across the Soviet Union, he is sick of trains, sick of strangers, and desperate to be home — and the prose curdles into a memorable gloom that makes the final leg one of the book’s strongest. Years later, in his 2008 return journey Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, Theroux revealed the private grief shadowing that homecoming: he came back to a marriage that was quietly falling apart. Read with that knowledge, the melancholy of the closing chapters acquires a deeper resonance — the restless traveler hurrying home to a domestic life that would not survive.

The Verdict

The Great Railway Bazaar remains essential reading half a century on, both as the foundational text of modern travel writing and as a vivid, prickly, beautifully written record of a vanished Asia. It is not a comfortable or flattering book, and it is not meant to be: its honesty about the self-absorption, boredom, and occasional unpleasantness of long travel is precisely what separates it from the genre’s usual gloss. Read it for the sentences, for the historical snapshot, and for the bracing company of a narrator who never pretends to be better than he is.

Our rating: 4.0/5 — The book that invented modern travel writing: grumpy, funny, beautifully observed, and an irreplaceable portrait of 1970s Asia seen from a train window.

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