Colin Thubron
Colin Thubron disappears into his kitchen to make coffee. He’s concerned that his telephone doesn’t seem to work properly since he tried to install broadband and he’s irritated on my behalf that crossing London on the Underground has taken an unfairly long time and made me late for our appointment. We’re in his smart West London apartment in a leafy avenue near Queen’s Gate, and while the silver-haired Thubron waits for the kettle to boil, we make small talk. As he clatters around with mugs and spoons, I surreptitiously scan his bookcases. His book collection tells its own narrative of a man as fascinated with the progress of 20th-century English literature as with travel. The novels of William Golding share shelf-space with the travel classics of Patrick Leigh Fermor, while the poems of TS Eliot are up there with histories of the Mughal princes. This duality of the literary and the geographical is an important thread that runs through Thubron’s life. While it’s true that he’s one of our best-loved and most accomplished travel writers, he’s also a novelist of some stature. He may well have won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award in 1988 for his epic Behind the Wall: A Journey through China, but in 2002, he made the long list for the far more prestigious Booker prize for his fictional work To The Last City. His opinion obviously matters: scattered around are new books sent by publishers in the hope that he might favourably review them; then there are the ones written by friends, sent in the hope that he might simply read them (“I wish I had the time,” he says).
Thubron is currently in the spotlight thanks to his latest book, Shadow of the Silk Road. To say it has done well is an understatement. It was easily the best-selling travel book over the Christmas period, and Thubron has given an unprecedented three lectures on the subject at the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG). Scenes created by disappointed punters turned away from the Ondaatje Lecture Theatre amounted to little less than dignified rioting. However, this isn’t to say that Shadow of the Silk Road has met with unmixed critical acclaim. Even his staunchest supporters admit that he can be difficult to read and “old-fashioned”. But what seems to have annoyed some of the newspaper critics this time around is his decision to include imaginary sequences of dialogue between himself and ancient Silk Road traders, which the Observer found “embarrassing in their melancholic self-regard”. Strong stuff indeed, and in no way justified as a criticism of a book that is about more than the objective realities of travelling. It’s also a view that overlooks the fact that Thubron is an innovator who, in order to create the emotional and imaginative depth his books require, is happy to experiment by integrating novel-writing techniques into his travelogues. This approach is, in fact, something of a revelation at a time when there are far too many undistinguished travel books being published, accounts of travel stunts contrived purely for the sake of writing about them. But Thubron, the elder statesman of his art, delivers original, literary observation that will still be in print long after we’ve forgotten the names of some of today’s authors.Is this alleged decline in travel writing simply down to the fact that there’s nowhere left to go? “I do think it’s a slight illusion that there’s nowhere left to travel,” says Thubron. “I remember doing a journey during the 1970s in which I took an old car across Asia through Iran and Afghanistan to Kashmir, North Pakistan and Lebanon. All of these places have become difficult, if not impossible, to travel in today. At that time, China and the Soviet Union were off the map altogether, and I thought I’d never get to explore them. And then, suddenly, the exact opposite happened – those two huge areas for exploration fell open, while the central Islamic countries became more difficult to travel in. Things change all the time.”
Crossing Central Asia
For the past century, ever since Sir Marc Aurel Stein brought the region to the attention of the wider public, the Silk Road has been a rich hunting ground for explorers and writers. In recent years, there has been a major exhibition at the British Library, a television series on the subject by geographer Nick Middleton and the much publicised all-women horseback ride along the length of the route by Alexandra Tolstoy and her three companions. So isn’t this rather over-exposed territory for Thubron? “What fascinated me was the countries themselves, the idea of Inner Asia, Central Asia, northwest China, the Islamic countries… the sort of in-between countries, those porous borders, the cultural transfusion that resulted from the endless movement of people in antiquity,” he explains. “All that interested me a lot and came before any idea of travelling the Silk Road itself. Then, later, as a result of my research, I recognised that the one binding element between all these countries was the Silk Road, so I came to it in a secondary way. I realised by the end of the book that almost all political borders are fake, and the real borders are elsewhere.”
The journey that makes up Shadow of the Silk Road was completed by Thubron in two legs: the first in 2003, the second the following year. It was impossible for him to get from China to Turkey in one hit because of the war in Afghanistan, a place where, according to Thubron, “it’s not a good idea to take a car”. Despite the fact that he researched his subject for a year and a half before setting out, the journey was planned in “rather a scatter-shot way” with a broad idea of which countries he was to travel through, but only “the vaguest notion of where I was to go in them”.
He says that this is the only way to do it, having learnt that if you try to arrange meetings, book hotels, stick to timetables, then the only things you can guarantee are endless hassle, problems and disappointments. “You have to forget that attitude we have in England where you expect everything to work for you,” he says, glancing mournfully at his telephone. “Why should everything work for you? If the buses don’t run, you miss the train, the camel goes lame, or the car breaks down, then you kind of have to accept that as part of the personality of the country you are in. Whether what happens is bad or good, it doesn’t really matter, provided there’s a book at the end of it.”
The idea of there being “a book at the end of it” is something that is always on Thubron’s mind, and a driving force behind some of his scarier adventures. Travelling alone, he says, means that there are always two of you on the journey: the one physically doing the travelling and the other sitting on your shoulder with a notebook and pencil. And it’s the latter who thinks, just as you are being mugged, “Hmmm, this is good copy… I think I’ll use this.”
It’s a tension between self-preservation and daring that not even the best writers can resolve. After all, he proffers, if you are travelling sensibly, at least in theory, nothing much bad will happen to you. You end up looking for experiences or, even worse, manufacturing them, whether consciously or not. “I’m very ashamed of this,” says Thubron, “but I am aware all the time I’m on a journey that it is for a book. All the time, there’s this dual business going on. You are going for experience and you push yourself to do things you’d never normally undertake. Maybe something dangerous. But that’s not courage.”
Rather than courage, he sees it as application to his trade. While travelling as a professional writer, he claims to imagine himself invulnerable in a way that he wouldn’t were he on holiday with his girlfriend, for example. Out on assignment, he’s looking for experiences; experiences others would try to avoid.
He cites as an example the moment he nearly died on the Silk Road journey. It had nothing to do with terrorism, Islamic fundamentalism, gun-toting tribal warlords or even natural disaster, but the combination of some Kyrgyz locals, vodka and a night drive. “I hadn’t realised how drunk they were,” he says. “Like most Central Asian peasants, they were subverted by vodka. The whole car seemed to pass out at the same time, including the driver.” The car veered slowly towards what Thubron says must have been the “only lorry driving in central Kyrgyzstan that night, and I don’t know how we missed it”.
Writer first, traveller second
Colin Thubron is different to most of today’s travel writers. He comes from a generation when his chosen genre was at its apex. The competition were fewer in number, although his contemporaries – Bruce Chatwin, Eric Newby, Jonathan Raban, Paul Theroux – were a fearsomely talented and diverse bunch. What he has in common with all of them is that he is a writer first and a traveller second. “Years ago, someone made the distinction between travellers who write and writers who travel,” he says. He is happy to place himself in the latter category – and equally happy to admit to being the “someone” who made the distinction in the first place. “Since I was a child, I wanted to be a writer. I wrote novels and I wrote bad poetry as a teenager…” The telephone rings and we look at each other significantly. The interview is over, but there’s one last question. I ask how he would like to be remembered. As a writer? He looks thoughtful before saying: “I suppose so, yes. Although it’s difficult to know what a writer is.”
May 2007
Thubron is currently in the spotlight thanks to his latest book, Shadow of the Silk Road. To say it has done well is an understatement. It was easily the best-selling travel book over the Christmas period, and Thubron has given an unprecedented three lectures on the subject at the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG). Scenes created by disappointed punters turned away from the Ondaatje Lecture Theatre amounted to little less than dignified rioting. However, this isn’t to say that Shadow of the Silk Road has met with unmixed critical acclaim. Even his staunchest supporters admit that he can be difficult to read and “old-fashioned”. But what seems to have annoyed some of the newspaper critics this time around is his decision to include imaginary sequences of dialogue between himself and ancient Silk Road traders, which the Observer found “embarrassing in their melancholic self-regard”. Strong stuff indeed, and in no way justified as a criticism of a book that is about more than the objective realities of travelling. It’s also a view that overlooks the fact that Thubron is an innovator who, in order to create the emotional and imaginative depth his books require, is happy to experiment by integrating novel-writing techniques into his travelogues. This approach is, in fact, something of a revelation at a time when there are far too many undistinguished travel books being published, accounts of travel stunts contrived purely for the sake of writing about them. But Thubron, the elder statesman of his art, delivers original, literary observation that will still be in print long after we’ve forgotten the names of some of today’s authors.Is this alleged decline in travel writing simply down to the fact that there’s nowhere left to go? “I do think it’s a slight illusion that there’s nowhere left to travel,” says Thubron. “I remember doing a journey during the 1970s in which I took an old car across Asia through Iran and Afghanistan to Kashmir, North Pakistan and Lebanon. All of these places have become difficult, if not impossible, to travel in today. At that time, China and the Soviet Union were off the map altogether, and I thought I’d never get to explore them. And then, suddenly, the exact opposite happened – those two huge areas for exploration fell open, while the central Islamic countries became more difficult to travel in. Things change all the time.”
Crossing Central Asia
For the past century, ever since Sir Marc Aurel Stein brought the region to the attention of the wider public, the Silk Road has been a rich hunting ground for explorers and writers. In recent years, there has been a major exhibition at the British Library, a television series on the subject by geographer Nick Middleton and the much publicised all-women horseback ride along the length of the route by Alexandra Tolstoy and her three companions. So isn’t this rather over-exposed territory for Thubron? “What fascinated me was the countries themselves, the idea of Inner Asia, Central Asia, northwest China, the Islamic countries… the sort of in-between countries, those porous borders, the cultural transfusion that resulted from the endless movement of people in antiquity,” he explains. “All that interested me a lot and came before any idea of travelling the Silk Road itself. Then, later, as a result of my research, I recognised that the one binding element between all these countries was the Silk Road, so I came to it in a secondary way. I realised by the end of the book that almost all political borders are fake, and the real borders are elsewhere.”
The journey that makes up Shadow of the Silk Road was completed by Thubron in two legs: the first in 2003, the second the following year. It was impossible for him to get from China to Turkey in one hit because of the war in Afghanistan, a place where, according to Thubron, “it’s not a good idea to take a car”. Despite the fact that he researched his subject for a year and a half before setting out, the journey was planned in “rather a scatter-shot way” with a broad idea of which countries he was to travel through, but only “the vaguest notion of where I was to go in them”.
He says that this is the only way to do it, having learnt that if you try to arrange meetings, book hotels, stick to timetables, then the only things you can guarantee are endless hassle, problems and disappointments. “You have to forget that attitude we have in England where you expect everything to work for you,” he says, glancing mournfully at his telephone. “Why should everything work for you? If the buses don’t run, you miss the train, the camel goes lame, or the car breaks down, then you kind of have to accept that as part of the personality of the country you are in. Whether what happens is bad or good, it doesn’t really matter, provided there’s a book at the end of it.”
The idea of there being “a book at the end of it” is something that is always on Thubron’s mind, and a driving force behind some of his scarier adventures. Travelling alone, he says, means that there are always two of you on the journey: the one physically doing the travelling and the other sitting on your shoulder with a notebook and pencil. And it’s the latter who thinks, just as you are being mugged, “Hmmm, this is good copy… I think I’ll use this.”
It’s a tension between self-preservation and daring that not even the best writers can resolve. After all, he proffers, if you are travelling sensibly, at least in theory, nothing much bad will happen to you. You end up looking for experiences or, even worse, manufacturing them, whether consciously or not. “I’m very ashamed of this,” says Thubron, “but I am aware all the time I’m on a journey that it is for a book. All the time, there’s this dual business going on. You are going for experience and you push yourself to do things you’d never normally undertake. Maybe something dangerous. But that’s not courage.”
Rather than courage, he sees it as application to his trade. While travelling as a professional writer, he claims to imagine himself invulnerable in a way that he wouldn’t were he on holiday with his girlfriend, for example. Out on assignment, he’s looking for experiences; experiences others would try to avoid.
He cites as an example the moment he nearly died on the Silk Road journey. It had nothing to do with terrorism, Islamic fundamentalism, gun-toting tribal warlords or even natural disaster, but the combination of some Kyrgyz locals, vodka and a night drive. “I hadn’t realised how drunk they were,” he says. “Like most Central Asian peasants, they were subverted by vodka. The whole car seemed to pass out at the same time, including the driver.” The car veered slowly towards what Thubron says must have been the “only lorry driving in central Kyrgyzstan that night, and I don’t know how we missed it”.
Writer first, traveller second
Colin Thubron is different to most of today’s travel writers. He comes from a generation when his chosen genre was at its apex. The competition were fewer in number, although his contemporaries – Bruce Chatwin, Eric Newby, Jonathan Raban, Paul Theroux – were a fearsomely talented and diverse bunch. What he has in common with all of them is that he is a writer first and a traveller second. “Years ago, someone made the distinction between travellers who write and writers who travel,” he says. He is happy to place himself in the latter category – and equally happy to admit to being the “someone” who made the distinction in the first place. “Since I was a child, I wanted to be a writer. I wrote novels and I wrote bad poetry as a teenager…” The telephone rings and we look at each other significantly. The interview is over, but there’s one last question. I ask how he would like to be remembered. As a writer? He looks thoughtful before saying: “I suppose so, yes. Although it’s difficult to know what a writer is.”
May 2007
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