We all have a little of Alexander the Great in us. That same insistent flame that drove one Macedonian across half of Asia in search of new worlds to conquer burns in everyone. We are all capable of seeing the whole world about us as an artwork to be coveted, an enigma to be solved, a question to whose answer we could devote all of our life and energy. It is just that most of us often need to be reminded of what is out there.
And so I am standing in an elegant study in west London, swaying slightly from motion sickness. A moment later, a man enters with a glass of water and a smile. He has a face made for smiling with, and it’s infectious. Colin Thubron is a people person: he has made the infinite strangeness and charm of the human race his concern for five decades. In a lifetime of travel he has passed through some of the world’s most dramatic landscapes and most magnificent cities, but time and again his narratives will stop for the whims of a child or the hopes and dreams of a young man.
This is a man for whom the world is a perpetual adventure. He grew up travelling back and forth between Britain and North America in the footsteps of his father, a military attache. Life was a great kaleidoscope: ‘I had hardly seen a river larger than the Thames, and then I was in the eastern lake country of Canada. I just remember the great excitement of the sheer fact of moving.’ After an Eton education that bequeathed him a headful of poetry and history, he went straight into publishing, and wound up in Damascus at the age of twenty-two, speaking no Arabic and with ‘no real sense that I knew what was going on.’
‘I was fascinated by what I didn’t understand,’ he remembers. In his mind’s eye, he threads a dust-paved street near the Bab Sharqi in Damascus’ old city, and a half-open door flashes a glimpse of a basalt courtyard with a secret fountain, ‘set up to invite your curiosity.’ He has spent his life going through such doors. Four years later he published his first travel book, Mirror to Damascus, which he describes as ‘simply a work of love.’ Blending history, poetry and above all a sympathetic interest in ordinary people, it set the tone that would characterise much of his travel writing. It is a book that carries the impress of the city as a bed retains its lover’s form. Thubron is adamant that it should be the pure experience of travel that moulds writing, not any grand theory or romantic idealisation. ‘You are responsible to what is out there.’ His books, he says, write themselves after the journey: ‘you just bum along, have all these meetings, and that’s the book.’
He is never bored. ‘I always feel that I haven’t got enough: I’m always on the outside trying to get in. Even when you’re on a train, there’s the landscape to understand, you’re constantly trying to get it, or else there will be somebody to have a conversation with.’ Nor is he ever lonely. No two people are ever alike, and he has a universal empathy that could draw a novel out of the poorest specimen of humanity. ‘Superficially, everybody seems alike – it takes time for you to differentiate.’ But he always does: he invariably finds exactly what makes every person and place he encounters special.
The entire continent of Asia unfolds with a crackling of incense and laughter from his books. He was one of the first Englishmen in Siberia and the former Soviet republics of Central Asia after they opened up to foreigners, and he was there to catalogue the Six Day War from Beirut, and the Cultural Revolution from rural China. The latter seems to have been the single most moving experience in his career. There, in spite of all his objectivity, he was appalled at the ‘denial of individual conscience,’ the way that ideas became more important than people. ‘I didn’t attempt to deny a sense of cultural superiority.’ One day, however, he came across a Chinese professor who had suffered intensely, but told Thubron that he was astonished that such barbarity had happened in an ancient civilisation like China and not in the brutal world of Europe, the world of Hitler and Stalin. ‘I was brought up short,’ says Thubron ruefully. The travel writer always finds the telescope turned back upon the observer.
His most recent – and favourite – book, Shadow of the Silk Road, draws all of these themes together. He made a gruelling voyage from central China to Antalya in Turkey overland alone, including a leg through an Afghanistan sundered by war; and the lesson he learned from this book – and from his career – is clear. Man is a chaotic phenomenon, and you underestimate this at your peril. Never, ever mistake him for something simple and easily defined. Travel writing, he believes, is there to cross borders and smash up preconceptions. ‘One can theorise to the end of time, but individuals are irreducible. The subversion of theory is one of the great joys of travel writing,’ he tells me with a puckish grin.
Now in his eighth decade, he is writing a new book about his journey up the Karnali river in Nepal – the highest source of the Ganges – to Mt Kailas in Tibet, ‘the holiest mountain in the world, I suppose.’ He interleaves his travel writing with successful short novels, which he sees as a kind of therapy, ‘a reaction to travel.’ Often they are set in claustrophobic, frenetic environments – a lunatic asylum, a prison, the head of an amnesiac – but, paradoxically, he describes such writing as ‘very liberating.’ Inner and outer life are, after seventy years, still just as much of an exuberant challenge as they ever were.
As our conversation draws to a close, he speaks of the writers and human beings whom he most admires – among them the great travellers Freya Stark and Patrick Leigh Fermor – with an immense affection. ‘Some people you meet and come away feeling the world is a grander place.’ I leave his house, and on either side of me the streets stretch away to infinity.
