(This review refers to the UK edition, published in 2006. Shadow of the Silk Road was published in the US in January 2007. As companions, I recommend Thubron’s books Behind the Wall, The Lost Heart of Asia, Among the Russians (published in the US as Where Nights Are Longest), and In Siberia, as well as A History of the Arab Peoples, by Albert Hourani.)

The first book of Colin Thubron’s I ever read was The Hills of Adonis, the British author’s now out-of-print 1968 book in which he searches out ancient temples while hiking through Lebanon. I found myself not only thirsty for his knowledge, insights, and impeccable wordcraft, but also relieved to be reading a travel writer who could take a solo hiking and camping trip through Lebanon without trying to eke thrills and danger from it. He was interested in traveling — in history and landscape and culture, and, most of all, people. He is now so successful at his chosen work of extracting the world’s secrets that I wish he would come to America and explain my country to me.

What makes Thubron’s books ring so true and valuable is that he never reaches for drama, never contrives an adventure or seeks out danger or digs for humor, as almost all modern travel writers now do. Thubron doesn’t need to. He writes about the world with a depth and precision and knowledge — as well as that essential, thirsty curiosity — that makes most other travel writing seem breathless and shallow. The way he has written about China and Russia in previous books (listed above) grounded understanding of these places. Shadow of the Silk Road stitches together those previous works. He travels through ethnicities and languages washing back and forth across political boundaries that chop the ghostly Silk Road into harsh and often arbitrary fragments.

It’s maybe the nature of the Silk Road itself that lends Thubron’s new book an epic quality that even his journey across Russia’s vastness in In Siberia didn’t quite attain. Thubron starts his 7000-mile journey near Xian, China, where the ancient Silk Road began (or ended, depending on how you look at it). Throughout his train, bus, and hitchhiking trips, and one unavoidable plane ride in war-torn Afghanistan, Thubron integrates the history of the Silk Road — its trade, languages, religions, rise and decline under various rulers, and the half-mythical history of silk itself — with constant interaction with whomever he can talk to in the local population. (Rarely is language a barrier: as any regular reader of Thubron knows, it’s surprising to find a language he hasn’t taught himself.) All while being pursued by the SARS virus and government officials trying to stamp it out.

Thubron seeks out acquaintances he met decades before, and wrote about in Behind the Wall and The Lost Heart of Asia, to see how they and their lives have changed. He once again tries to comprehend how cultures perceive themselves, and how the world’s view of them has affected that introspection. The Chinese, for example, are so often accused of being heartless, even by themselves. Empty of soul, whereas the Russians overflow with so much depth of soul that they drive themselves to drink and depression.

From Xian he moves through China’s most unreachable territories, south of the Taklmakan Desert, with their cultural identities that could form countries of their own, before crossing to the ‘Stans (Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan) on his way to journey’s end in Antakya, Turkey. In the former Soviet republics, ethnic and national identities (sometimes manufactured by the Soviet Union) clash with nostalgia for the strength of the Soviet machine.

Thubron is such a valuable travel writer not just because he’s an excellent writer, but because his intelligence and education allow him to penetrate cultures, and people, seeking a meaning far beyond the personal. Through Silk Road, the world is rebalanced again with the weight of its history, always a necessary antidote to the aim of contemporary power-holders and populations to approach the future with a heedless hurry that forgets its past. Sometimes our modern world feels on the brink of shattering itself. Silk Road puts conflicts both modern and ancient back into comprehensible, if not manageable, context.

Extra interest for me came from the level of the personal that Thubron included in this book. In previous works, Colin Thubron as a person, a traveler, is almost completely effaced. He’s interested in the world, not in his personal journey. But in Silk Road he loses his temper with bribe-taking officials and allows frustration with travel arrangements to show (including being almost killed by a couple of men, dead drunk, driving him home). And he questions his own need to travel constantly, through imaginary discussion with a Sogdian trader from thousands of years ago, discussions all of us, as travelers, might have with ourselves on dark nights in lonely places:

He: What are you going for?

I: For understanding. To dispel fear.

He: Why should your understanding dispel fear, idiot?

I [worried]: It’s true, it may confirm it.

He: Are you then, afraid?

I: I’m afraid of nothing happening, of experiencing nothing. That is what the modern traveller fears (forgive me). Emptiness. Then you hear only yourself.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 10th, 2007 at 9:12 am and is filed under Antonia projects, Asia travel, Middle East travel, travel books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.