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• Interview With Paul Theroux: Invisible Man on a Ghost Train

Interview With Paul Theroux: Invisible Man on a Ghost Train

Indeed, you met up with Haruki Murakami in Tokyo in the new book, and I enjoyed the pleasure you took in his invisibility in Tokyo. Even when the two of you were entering the Tokyo subway, which he wrote about so famously, nobody recognized him.

I thought that was really interesting. That’s a perfect example of it. He’s Japan’s most famous writer and no one knows what he looks like. That’s great, actually.

Our reviewer thought she detected more compassion and even admiration from you in the way you wrote about the people you encountered on this journey, more so than in previous books. And I thought I detected that, too. Do you think there’s anything to that? Do you see people differently than you did decades ago?

I think it’s possible. I don’t know whether I’d use the word compassion. More understanding, or attempting to understand things that I would have generalized or written off before. But I think that’s a factor of age. Maybe I’m less of a wise guy. I really don’t know. That’s something only the reader can judge. It’s hard for me to judge. But if you’re saying, do I take people more seriously? Maybe I do. When you’re young and you travel, you don’t compare your life with others’ lives. But when you’ve lived a little, you say, this person is my age but look how different his life has been. When you’re young, you say, my whole life is ahead of me.

This is another reason why it’s amazing and enjoyable to be an older writer. I’m sorry that the older writers of the past didn’t repeat their journeys. At my age, most writers were writing their autobiographies. Graham Greene started his autobiography when he was about my age. Evelyn Waugh wrote A Little Learning when he was about my age. So did Ford Maddox Ford. Conrad wrote a personal record when he was my age. The older writers of the past tended to say, I’m going to tidy up my affairs, sum up my life and then I don’t know, have a cup of tea and go to bed. But I really don’t feel that way. If someone said what do you want to do, I wouldn’t say I want to write my memoir. I’d say I’d like to go to Angola, I’d like to go back to the Congo. I don’t want to sit around saying I was born and this happened and talk about my childhood.

You wrote, “If a place, after decades, is the same, or worse, than before, it is almost shaming to behold.” And you found Romania to be a somewhat sad place. But what place were you most heartened by on this return trip?

Vietnam. The difference between Vietnam at war and in peacetime couldn’t be greater. The Soviet Union morphing into Russia is not that dramatic. Although there are huge changes, it was a place of great fear before. But I think that Vietnam—because we were there, we were fighting, we were dropping seven million tons of bombs on them, and millions of gallons of Agent Orange. We defoliated them, we killed them, we flattened them, and they crawled out from the wreckage and built, I think, a very viable country that we gave them no help with. In fact, up until ‘94 there was an embargo. We only tried to prevent them from developing. And yet they did. They managed without us, so there’s a hopeful thing. People can survive without American aid. If a people are true to their traditions and see themselves as a nation, they can survive and prosper. Certainly that happened in Vietnam.

In the past, you’ve talked about the importance of isolating oneself in one’s travels, making oneself difficult to reach. And the idea that followed from that was that the more one isolates oneself, the more rewarding or powerful the travel experience is. And yet this time you traveled with a BlackBerry, you stayed in contact with home. I’m curious how that changed your experience.

It did change it, to tell you the truth. When you have a BlackBerry you’re in touch. I could run my life, answer emails, log on and so forth. It’s a detriment, obviously. I don’t really want to be in touch. I tried to see the BlackBerry as a device for playing BrickBreaker, that video game like Pong where you break bricks and try to get a big score. I got up to 8,500 points and thought, OK, that’s the use of it. It came in very useful at certain times, I can’t deny that.

On the whole, though it was useful, I’d rather travel without it. But my wife was happier getting messages from me and the reassurance that I was all right. But I think disappearing is part of the job. It’s not to be recommended for everyone. But travel writing is not recommended for everyone. When I lived in Africa, I didn’t have a telephone and there was no internet. I wrote a letter home and they wrote a letter back, and it took six weeks to go back and forth. And that was a good thing. I learned the language as a result, I was immersed in a culture. There’s no refuge. You can’t hide. You’ve got to make friends and deal with people. Now, I suppose Peace Corps volunteers, when they’re having a tough time, call home, they get on the computer, and they sort of disappear and withdraw from the country, and I don’t think that’s great.

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