Not all travel writers travel equally well from one side of the Atlantic to the other, even if the subtlety of their observations and seductiveness of their words argue that they should.
The name Colin Thubron resonates far less in America than the names of British and American peers such as Jonathan Raban, Paul Theroux, Bill Bryson, Jan Morris or the late Bruce Chatwin. Yet in his native England the long, lanky man with the boyish shock of hair, grave face and light voice is recognized as one of the best literary traveling companions a reader can find.
In eight works spanning more than three decades, he's delved into Central Asia and China (The Lost Heart of Asia; Behind the Wall), traversed Western Russia (Where Nights Are Longest) and now, at age 60, has attempted to pierce the depths of Russia's melancholy soul in his latest book, In Siberia, published by HarperCollins. In between far-flung sojourns, he's explored wrenching inner landscapes in a half-dozen slim novels -- including Turning Back the Sun, Falling, A Cruel Madness -- praised by the likes of P.D. James, Cyril Connolly and Anita Brookner. Behind the Wall was a 100,000-copy British hardcover bestseller, and Thubron has received a Thomas Cook Travel Award, Hawthornden Prize and PEN Silver Pen Award.
Harper's Terry Karten published Turning Back the Sun in 1993 and The Lost Heart of Asia a year later (both now available in Perennial) and In Siberia. Thubron's previous books, published by Little, Brown, Atlantic Monthly and Random House, are currently not available in U.S. editions. His British hardcovers are published by Chatto, paperbacks by Penguin. Gillon Aitken agents them all.
PW caught up with this nomadic descendant of the poet John Dryden not in some far-flung corner nor at home in Notting Hill, London, but in an intimate 19th-century townhouse nestled behind the Art Museum in center city Philadelphia. Thubron has spent part of each of the last five years sharing the home of his American companion, Margreta Delgrazia, a Renaissance scholar at the University of Pennsylvania to whom he's dedicated his latest book.
We chat, looking out onto the blustery, frigid street from a small, elegant room whose old furniture and polished parquet could almost be in London -- but not quite. It is a little too spare given the English propensity for clutter either cosy or grand. But the temperature in the old house is entirely English: cool, drafty, suited to a kind of conversation native to London sitting rooms of a certain class. Thubron's disarmingly bright smile warms the room, unexpectedly radiating a generous, even vulnerable friendliness unusual in a man of his background. Easy, now, to understand how he wins a stranger's trust during months of chance encounters on the road.
He never attended a university, but is an old Etonian, and in 1950s England that was passport enough. His father, a military attaché, was posted to Canada, then to America in the late 1940s. Between the ages of eight and 12, Thubron crossed and recrossed the Atlantic on his own to visit his parents for holidays. That gave him "an early physical love of movement and pleasure and excitement in travel," he confides.
However, the "love of writing," he says, "came even before the love of travel. As a child, being descended from England's first p t laureate was a very grand thing. It was important to me that writing was something respectable and splendid." As a teen, Thubron recalls, "I imagined being a writer meant being a novelist." Now he professes "two different identities, coming from two different parts of myself."
The fiction Thubron describes as "rather severely constructed." Falling takes place in a prison, A Cruel Madness in a mental hospital. "The novels are autobiographical in feeling -- but not in fact," he hastens to add. "They arise from areas of emotional experience that are personal to me, and to some extent they're reactions against the travel books."
Thubron's fiction is decidedly "British" in sensibility: concise and restrained even when exploring intense emotion -- one reason perhaps why it's little known in America. Why the nonfiction hasn't caught on is the greater mystery. Expansive and descriptive as it meanders through big cities and tiny backwaters, it diverges into character sketches, historical digressions and stories of all sorts. A civilized intelligence, p tic immediacy and authenticity of feeling mark novels and travel writing alike.
After Eton Thubron worked for four years in publishing, first at Hutchinson in London and then from '65 to '66 at Macmillan in New York. In between he had begun to travel. By his mid-20s he had made a film for the BBC in Japan, and at 27 wrote his first book, Mirror to Damascus. In those days, inspiration came from the "enchantment, the limpid and yet economical p try of Freya Stark" and "the sheer robustness and delight in sensuous detail" of Patrick Leigh Fermor. Of his contemporaries Theroux, Raban and Chatwin, Thubron admits to "being conscious of and in different ways admiring -- but not entirely so!"
A young writer can't live on words alone, and in the mid-'70s Thubron wrote four books "for the money," two of them, The Venetians and The Ancient Mariners, for Time-Life in Alexandria, Va. It was an introduction to a totally foreign editorial culture. "In the assiduous desire for accuracy, the editing ended up producing an absolute garbling of the writing," Thubron laughs. Several years later he briefly hired out his pen once more, but this time to happier effect working at the Bookseller in London.
In both traveling and writing Thubron eschews the easy and exotic in favor of more difficult terrain. Survival requires "a tough constitution and very strong stomach. I travel to do a job," he says, "and the things you expect of yourself are quite different from when you're on holiday. You can't take notice of the fears of the local people when they tell you, 'Don't go there.' If you don't go to extreme places, you haven't done justice to the country. And as long as you're getting good copy everything's fine, even if bad things are happening." But some of that "good copy" is obtained at a very dear price indeed.
In Siberia describes how, for lack of transportation, Thubron is forced to spend three weeks in a place called Potalovo. It becomes a stay in hell. Toward the end, when he sees his face in a mirror there, he thinks he's looking at a Russian tramp peering through a window. The disorientation and wear and tear he has experienced render him literally unrecognizable to himself. "Confusedly I try to collate the inner and outer person," he writes. "I wonder if the mirror is distorting. If it isn't, something else must be. The face looks anxious.... I turn away, disowning it."
The confidence to "go there" and ignore sensible warnings to the contrary Thubron attributes to his very "English" upbringing -- about which he is also deeply conflicted. "An Arab once told me that the English, having no hearts, were always searching for them elsewhere," he remarks about a third of the way through his Siberian journey. Similar musings punctuate his other narratives.
When PW mentions this, he is silent for a few moments before replying: "The Englishness Eton represents is something I disliked. In the late '50s Eton promulgated a cult of your own personality above everything, the cult of an effortlessly superior 'casual man' who was taught not to care too much because caring was bad form. Yet I was obsessively caring and still am. My characters are obsessive in the novels.
"On the other hand," he continues, "I benefited from the independence that Eton inculcated. It is that sense of entitlement that enables English travel writers to go with a surety that things will be all right and a confidence in their own perceptions."
How and why does he choose his destinations? "I wish I knew," he replies with a wry smile. "With the early books, I suppose it was a young man's romantic curiosity about Arab urban life, the lure of a civilization not hopelessly out of reach of Western civilization."
The motivation to visit Russia and China was different. "In 1978 I was in a car crash and fractured my spine. During the months of enforced leisure, I dreamt grandiose travel dreams. I wanted to approach the lands I had always been taught to fear."
Thubron's first book about Russia, Where Nights are Longest, describes a 10,000-mile solo car journey across Brezhnev's U.S.S.R., during which he was trailed by the KGB. The book's opening lines make the challenges abundantly clear: "I had been afraid of Russia ever since I could remember.... I grew up in its shadow, just as my parents had grown up in the shadow of Germany.... But I think I wanted to know and embrace this enemy I had inherited."
In The Lost Heart of Asia he ventured further east, to the Central Asian republics of the former U.S.S.R. But the key to unlocking Russia's most mysterious mythologies was of course Siberia. The land that conjures in Western imaginations either the fearful white wildness of nature or the horrific gulags of Stalinism was for Thubron "irresistible." Asia and Russia have been his twin fascinations and Siberia combines both. It also "impends through the darkness as the ultimate, unearthly Abroad." In Mongolian, Thubron tells us, "Siber" signifies "beautiful, pure." In Tartar, "sibir" means "sleeping land." His encounters across the one-twelfth of the Earth's land mass that is Siberia make the sleeping land come achingly alive.
He takes us to Serpentinka, one of the many former torture and execution centers he visited. In 1938 alone, 26,000 prisoners died there. Thubron says he "longed to find the Russians outraged at such places, but people seemed in some ghastly way to be accepting. It was like the weather, it was how things were. The persecuted and persecutors were indistinguishable in so many ways. There was no sense of memory being a path to rectitude. The gulag is simply being allowed to rot."
And the people, both past and present, whom he limns: priests, academics, believers, babushkas, con men, tramps. Jews bound for Israel so cut off from their religion that they pray to Christian icons on their walls. Drunks and lost communities of children who start downing vodka at age 12.
There is no curtain of omniscient objectivity in Thubron's travels. With an elegiac lyricism he shares reactions, sorrows, even moments of personal shame. He writes in the first, second and third person, using the second "to break up the monotony of myself," and the third for distance. Thubron smiles: "It suggests that the writer puts himself up for judgement in his own landscape. That he's fallible."
Each book takes three years of his life: a year or so of intensive language learning and research; four or five months in the target country; a year of so of 14-hour writing days. How does he distill all those experiences on the road?
There's an apologetic hesitation. "Whenever a conversation hits me, I make very full notes almost immediately. I don't tell people I'm going to write about them, because I've learned if you tell them it makes them very theatrical. They think it's ordinary friendship, but in fact, you're utilizing them."
Once a book is published, Thubron says, "I never reread it. They're like distant relations you don't much care for!"
Yet it's clear he cares very much about the people he's encountered on his way. What future does he foresee for Siberia?
"Whatever happens, it will be very slow. I had hoped that the further I got from the bureaucratic center, the more communities would have held together. But the further I went the worse it became: without centralized control, everything was falling to bits. Russia can't get much worse. The people will dig in, wait, be patient -- what the Russians are very good at doing."
And as if to prove that the melancholy hasn't totally overwhelmed the place -- or its scribe -- Thubron says, by way of coda, "I was never depressed by the Siberian landscape. So much of it was extraordinarily beautiful. And there's something reassuring about that, at least, having survived."
