Anthony Sattin

The Last Train to Zona Verde, by Paul Theroux – review

Paul Theroux has produced some of the best travel books of the past 50 years, and some of the lamest. His latest work shrieks swansong, from its title — The Last Train — to the acknowledgement that he has reached ‘the end of this sort of travel, marinated in politics and urban wreckage’, to the closing words with which he ‘felt beckoned home’. So, if this is the last of Theroux as epic traveller, has he gone out with a bang, or another whimper?

In his 2002 book, Dark Star Safari (not his best), Theroux travelled along the eastern side of the African continent from Cairo to Cape Town. This time he decided to even things out by travelling in the west, from South Africa to Namibia and Angola. The plan is sketchy to say the least; late on in the book, he does mention the idea of getting up into Mali and ending in Timbuktu, but by then it is clear that he will not. It all sounds very random, but Theroux the writer can get away with that sort of thing. The question is whether Theroux the traveller can keep up.

At 72 years of age, he is now older than most people in the continent to which he has returned throughout his life. As a young man, he spent several years in Uganda, worked for the Peace Corps. That was where he married his wife and where his first child was born. It was perhaps also where he found his voice as a writer. ‘Africa gave me everything,’ he admits here. He has returned to the continent regularly over the decades and written about it in several books. This latest one has some of the same faults as Dark Star Safari, including the sweeping overstatements (Cape Town is not the only city in Africa to aspire to grandeur) and generalisations about Africa and Africans: imagine how annoying it would be to read a book set in England where the natives are constantly referred to as Europeans.

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