halfway around

There are many ways of traveling. One can rent a car and explore, drifting from place to place with scant regard for plans or timelines. One can be holed up in a city and discover the place on foot. One can also hike out into the wilderness, pitching a tent in a different spot every night. One can take the backpack to civilization and weave through the urban fabric of a region or a country by coach, railroad or minibus. Or one can put basecamp in a comfortable hotel and explore the surrounding areas in an out-and-back fashion by whatever means of transportation is convenient.

Paul Theroux has probably done all of the above, but his favorite mode of travel is the railroad. He once remarked that "I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it." In the early 70s, his love for track-bound travel resulted in a pan-Eurasian grand tour, published a few years later as The Great Railway Bazaar.

This book made his name, but it's far from his only one. I encountered him first in The Kingdom by the Sea, a similar grand tour, albeit on a smaller scale, of the United Kingdom, mostly conducted by coach and on foot because National Rail doesn't cover all the coastline of Great Britain, let alone the surrounding islands.

I was enchanted by the way Theroux lets every place, journey or way station, no matter how dull or drab, come alive, mostly by letting the people he encounters speak. Not only this, he gives them all names, as if he knew them personally. I thought this was a gimmick until a friend from Scotland recognized the guy who used to drive him to school every morning.

The other day, I finished The Pillars of Hercules, the account of yet another grand tour. The book chronicles Theroux's first foray into the Mediterranean. The author, who hadn't before been to Spain, Egypt or Morocco, sets out to travel from Gibraltar, the northern Pillar of Hercules, to Ceuta, a possible southern one. Across the Strait of Gibraltar, this would take an hour on the ferry but the long way, along the Spanish, French, Italian, Balkan, Greek, Turkish, Levantine and North African coasts and across a few islands on the way, it takes a good year and a half.

The first third, by distance, of the trip is vintage Theroux: acute observations, dry wit, occasional benevolent condescension, precise descriptions, and interactions with nearly everyone encountered on the way. Spain gives way to France; Monaco is left for Corsica, Sardinia and Sicily; the east coast of Italy is traded for the Balkans. The pages fly effortlessly, but three fifth in, the troubles start.

The mid-nineties, when the trip was undertaken, weren't a good time for traveling around the Mediterranean. Serbs, Croats and Bosnians were at each other's necks, Israel was shelling Lebanon and occupied Gaza, fundamentalists slit thousands of throats in Algeria, terrorists bombed Egypt, Kurds fought back in Turkey, and Albania was completely disintegrating as a country. Lots of places weren't safe and the narrative ends.

After a summer at home, recovering his spirits and waiting for the return of the low season, Theroux continues but he changes pace. The coastal railroad makes way for cruise ships and ferries, a substitution that completely changes the character of the book – because it changes the character of the traveling. Instead of visiting places that take his momentary fancy and talking to locals, Theroux gets comfortable on a big boat and studies the characters around him.

This is not exploring anymore or even traveling, it's cruising. Taking the easy way out of a tight spot is one way of looking at it. More generous would be to grant that Theroux made the most out of a bad situation. The most is not the best, however. The best would have been to finish the manuscript after the chapter on Albania and abandon the conceit of circumnavigating the Mediterranean. The title would have to be changed and an overarching story invented, but the 300-page book would have been a good one.

Instead, the book switches from the desolation and poverty of Albania on one page to a roster of dignitaries and aging bigwigs floating blissfully on a luxury cruise ship on the next. The disparity threw me off balance and made me doubt I was still reading the same book. But I was, and the struggle continues for another 200 pages, painfully disjointed in scope from their predecessors. Not much happens on the ships or ferries and landfall is rare. Few places are mentioned and even less of their local color is captured.

Conversations with fellow passengers and musings on traveling and travel writing must suffice. Theroux is aware that he's shortchanging the reader, but his repeated excuses for taking the cruise ship in the first place and his professed desire to get off it feel dishonest and are tiring. ("My idea was to find a way of going back to Greece and Turkey, not do a hatchet job on a hip-load of cruise passengers, supine on the sun deck, reading Danielle Clancy and Clive Grisham ...")

The outing to Malta with his co-cruisers is a travesty. Like a package tourist, Theroux skims over the highlights, "giving [the island] a good five hours of thorough scrutiny." Greece, which Theroux dislikes enormously, is given equally short shrift, though its coast is nearly unlimited. Turkey is nothing more than a few days in Istanbul and a day-long bus ride to Syria. At the end of the book, nearing Morocco, traveling has become an afterthought and the writing positively self-infatuated.

There are some gems among the gloom, though it would be better had they been allowed to stand on their own in a separate little book. Theroux's been traveling for decades, and his skill and experience can be studied more easily when he doesn't dazzle with crisp description of improbably encounters. There's much to learn for aspiring travel writers, either spelled out on the pages or poorly hidden between the lines. For example, Theroux "makes notes" where everyone else would just take them, just as a serious photographer makes his photos and doesn't just take them.

He considers the correctness of the facts he reports the prime criterion of the value of his writing. Indeed, in travel writing "all that matters is that the facts are generally true, so that a historian, some Fernand Braudel of the futures, will be able to use your book as a source for, say, the condition of Albania and 1994." That's stated explicitly. But between the lines I read that accurate facts must go along with skillful presentation. The context must be drawn broadly and clearly, by the rearrangement of encounters, by the introduction of characters that show certain details more convincingly, and by creative chronology. Artistic license allows for that; a good book calls for it.

The Pillars of Hercules is not a good book, but if it were torn apart at page 300, it would be two good though incomplete books: a third of a travelogue around the Mediterranean and an involuntary travel writing tutorial. They don't go too well together but are worth reading individually. The second "book" might just give the tools and motivation to attempt completion of the trip that Theroux failed in. And with some luck (and the persistent courage of the peoples of Libya and Syria), the time might soon come when such a feat will be possible.