W a y m a r k s ~: Colin Thubron - Time Seen As A Road ... Or A River

Colin Thubron

There is something mellifluously melancholy in the tone of Colin Thubron’s travel books. He is a wonderful writer, a genuine poet in prose. Curiously, his writing manages to be both orientated entirely inward, whilst also being outward-looking at the same time. It really is quite remarkable. And it is perhaps this paradox which is what makes his travel books such satisfying reading. As travel writers go, he is perhaps the travel writer’s paragon – the kind of travel writer whom most would-be travel writers might aspire to emulate. Oddly shy and unassuming, and yet open to experiences and interactions. He frequently ends up chatting to all sorts of ordinary and unusual people, tagging along with them, sharing a train compartment, or being invited into their homes and their lives; drifting along, progressing on his way until something or nothing happens. Either way the outcome is equally mesmerising. He does bathos and pathos with aplomb.

There are moments of drama too, usually rendered with beautiful understatement, such as when the police turn up and haul him off for questioning, as they frequently seem to do. This is usually because Colin is drawn to the parts of the world which aren’t exactly used to receiving visiting tourists, at least not those of a lone hapless, wandering Englishman-type, such as he appears to be. Naturally they suspect he must be up to no good; some sort of criminal or clandestine activity, possibly spying? – But Colin is wonderfully ‘old school’, as some might say. He tends to eschew modern technology, and he rarely travels with a camera. Only his spidery and illegible handwriting in his notebooks inadvertently lends him a taint of suspicion, but as soon as he begins to translate his scribbled notes for his interrogator, the police quickly come to realise Thubron is indeed a wandering poet, waxing lyrical about landscapes they find mundane but which he sees as sublime.

I came to Colin Thubron’s travel books quite late, and I really can’t understand how or why I had not come across him before. It was an interview he gave on BBC Radio 4, back in early 2007, when he was promoting his then recently published book, Shadow of the Silk Road. I was entranced by his evocative descriptions of travelling through landscapes and reflecting upon the history of places which had long held a deep and abiding fascination for me. And it was later on, in the summer of that same year, when I was travelling through China, that I began reading Shadow of the Silk Road for myself. I realised it was kind of oddly serendipitous to begin reading the book there in Xi’an, where the book itself begins; but, unlike Colin, the journey which I was about to undertake would lead in the opposite direction, heading east, overland to Beijing. I had gone there to escort a cohort of terracotta warriors across China and onwards to London for a landmark exhibition at the British Museum, entitled ‘The First Emperor.’ Whereas the Shadow of the Silk Road recounts Thubron’s 7000-mile journey heading west, travelling from China through Central Asia and Afghanistan to the Islamic countries of the Middle East and on to the Mediterranean. A route along which he is haunted by the persona of another traveller, talking to him across the vast Steppe-like expanse of time in the bygone centuries-old voice of a Sogdian camel driver travelling with one of the old merchant caravans which used to cross the deserts and the high plateaus of the network of routes which once criss-crossed that region, now collectively and somewhat Romantically known as ‘the Silk Road.’

Thubron has often spoken of the solitary traveller as being two people travelling in tandem. There is the person who is actually doing the travelling – clocking the miles, suffering the pains and anxieties, marvelling at the wonders both large and small which befall him along the way; but then there is also the person, the travel writer side of himself, who (in a sense) sits upon his shoulder throughout the journey – noting all the things which will make ‘good copy’ for a travel book, and often consoling him with that fact when he finds himself in situations of adversity, such as when he gets questioned by suspicious police officers. The greatest fear for a travel writer, he has said, is that nothing will happen at all.

In reading Thubron’s books the reader experiences the world with him. He has such a wonderfully deft way with words and emotions that while his books are deeply personal documents, they also seem somehow oddly divested from him as their author. When he published To A Mountain in Tibet in 2011, I heard him joke (again on the radio) that people had sometimes complained that he didn’t put more of himself into his books, but that with this one, they might now wish he’d done the opposite, because To A Mountain in Tibet is a deeply personal book. It is a book about a journey he made on foot, a pilgrimage of sorts, making the kora around Mount Kailash – a sacred mountain which is central to the cosmology of several major religions, but at its core it is also a book which deals with the universally felt subject of grief. People often speak of life as being a journey or of time being seen as a road, and travelling – escaping the everyday of our own worlds and all that is familiar to us by going somewhere far away and utterly different in terms of society, culture, language, religion – this kind of travelling can be a way of reflecting upon ourselves, who we are, where we come from, and how we fit into the wider aspect of a globalised world. Travel is thereby seen as a way of breaking down boundaries, crossing borders and bridging divides which might otherwise have remained unseen or worse, wilfully overlooked. In that sense travel is not about seeking escape, but rather of seeking to find something extra. Redefining the self and our home in sympathy as well as in contrast to that which we might simply assume to be ‘other’ is what the real goal of most travellers tends to be. I read To A Mountain in Tibet at a time of similar although slightly different emotional upheaval in my life, and so the book certainly spoke to me on more than one level, as it was perhaps intended to do. It was a reminder to me that both travel and the closely allied activities of reading and writing can be a balm to the soul.

Thubron’s latest book, The Amur River: Between Russia and China (2021) is equally sublime. It is certainly one of Thubron’s best travel books, in my opinion. In this book he travels the length of the Amur from its source in Mongolia to the coast, opposite the northern part of Sakhalin Island, where the river emerges between the Sea of Japan and the Okhotsk Sea. It’s an enormous watercourse, undammed and largely unknown in comparison to its more famous cousins, such as the Amazon, the Danube, or the Nile. Along the way he alternates between the river’s northern and southern shores, between Russia and China. The Amur forms a boundary which both divides and connects these two geographically huge nations, each vastly different in culture and outlook, which meet along one section of its banks. The huge disparities in terms of populations and local economies makes the locals on either side of the river uneasy neighbours. As with all of Thubron’s travel books, he seeks out insights into the histories and cultures, both national and local, of the people whom he meets along the way. He relates the snippets of themselves and their lives as they reveal their personal stories to him. He is particularly interested in the original indigenous customs, seeking out the traces of shamans and their animistic beliefs which seem to linger, often half-forgotten, having almost been entirely obliterated by centuries of incomers hailing from the larger surrounding polities and their overwhelming tides of political and religious ideologies, seeking to modernise, revolutionise or capitalise upon an uncompromising land and an unruly watercourse which ultimately always seems to defeat them.

One gets the sense from reading Thubron that the further he travels along the Amur the more remote it becomes, even from itself. It feels like a place oddly forgotten and removed from the wider world, even though the myriad worlds of its own which it forms along its course all seem somehow larger than life as it is lived in other parts of our modern and globally interconnected world. Reflecting upon this, he quotes one of my favourite writers: “In a poignant passage of Andrei Makine’s ‘Once Upon the River Love’, his protagonist speculates that you could spend your life on the remote Amur and never discover whether you were ugly or beautiful, or understand the sensual topography of another human body. ‘Love, too, did not easily take root in this austere county …’ (p.261-262)

I’ve often wondered about the Amur. Firstly, having come across it in other books I’ve read, particularly about nineteenth-century Russian explorers such as Nikolay Przhevalsky, who explored the Ussuri region, and Nikolay Muravyov-Amursky, who led the expansion of the Russian Empire to the shores of the Sea of Japan. And secondly, from having glimpsed parts of it or its tributaries when flying across Siberia en route to and from Japan, looking down upon such a vast and expansive frozen landscape with real fascination. Hence, I was very keen to read Thubron’s account of his following this long-flowing riverine thread through a land I’ve only ever glimpsed and imagined from afar. A river so long it has many different names, among which it is: the Onon in Mongolia, the Heilong Jiang in China, and the Amur in Russia.

Thubron’s journey along the river’s course was not an easy one. In Mongolia he begins his journey on horseback, but not long after he sets out his horse stumbles in the boggy ground and falls upon him which results in a couple of cracked ribs and a broken ankle – and yet Thubron, who is in his eighties, stoically soldiers on, mentally kidding himself that his ankle is merely sprained. The thought of curtailing his trip and returning home to properly convalesce is a far more painful prospect than carrying on. Thubron is a true traveller to his core. And thankfully – as he always does – Thubron shapes a journey around himself which is inimitably his own. Mastering just enough of the languages of the people he travels among before setting out – in this case Russian and Mandarin – in order to converse with them unmediated. He says he takes a year to research and prepare before embarking, and then about a year afterwards to write his journey up. Consequently, his travel books are undoubtedly on a par with, and in some cases more than equal to those who have similarly found fame in defining the genre, writer-travellers such as: Patrick Leigh Fermor, Bruce Chatwin, Wilfred Thesiger, Eric Newby, Robert Byron, Ryszard Kapuscinski, Gavin Young, Paul Theroux, Dervla Murphy, et al.

I’m not at all surprised that Thubron is drawn to the fictional works of Andrei Makine. He and Makine clearly share a common ground in their fascination for the sublime, for Russian melancholy, and for deeply profound meditations upon the slow passing of time and memory, deftly rendered with the lightest and most masterfully-understated touches of true sympathy. For me Colin Thubron’s writings represent the pinnacle of what I am seeking in a good travel book: a deeply lyrical and contemplative exploration of both place and people, a deft mixing of history, anthropology, landscape, and atmosphere, illuminated through individual insight. The best travel books in my opinion, like a river, wend a slow and unhurried way through our shared world, showing us places far beyond our own doorstep – places which we might never see or experience for ourselves; but done so through carefully considered words, words through which we might see and live vicariously. Travel writing is undoubtedly a craft of its own kind, offering the reader an escape through someone else’s eyes – wherein words can shape mellifluous memories which often remain with us long after we’ve finished our first reading of such books. The Amur River is certainly one to treasure.

Somewhere over Russia, near the Sea of Japan - 2004

“In the mist of early morning the far shore next day is only a sepia hairline, as though the horizon had rusted away at its edges. The river is formidable now. For over 2,500 miles it has gathered its tributaries from a basin almost the size of Mexico, until its brown flood pours northward through a channel that sometimes reaches three miles across. As our boat shudders upriver in the lightening day, the eastern shore ascends in mountain walls of pine, spruce and birch, where wisps of cloud dangle, as if from steaming jungle. Even as we speed beneath them, Sergei and Alexander go on smoking, cupping the cigarettes in their hands against the headwind, while our beer bottles dwindle alongside a bag of frozen smelts with cartoon faces.” – Colin Thubron, The Amur River (p.247-248)