All aboard the slow train to happiness
Travel books are the easiest books in the world to write, and also the hardest. easy, because all you have to do is set out on a journey, see what happens and write it all down. Hard, because it’s astoundingly difficult to do it well.
Three cheers, then, for Monisha rajesh, who is a rare rising star of the genre. rajesh is a young British-asian woman whose previous book, around India In 80 Trains, garnered a lot of praise and, having read this one, I can see why.
She has a simple and easy style, she sees everything and listens to everyone, she’s funny when she wants to be and serious when she needs to be, and she keeps the whole thing barrelling along like a wonderful dinner party conversation. In short, she never bores.
a travel writer who never bores! She should have a 24-hour-a-day armed guard to ensure she stays safe and unharmed for future generations of readers.
rajesh has a simple idea, which is to go round the world on trains. Slightly concerned that she is a small young woman with, as yet, no armed guard, she persuades her fiance Jem to go, too.
She is by instinct and practice a traveller, having grown up as the child of two doctors who were always moving around the country to find work, but Jem is a homebody who has never gone on a longer train journey than King’s Cross to York, and isn’t used to bags that aren’t on wheels.
But they are a good pairing and have since got married and had their first child, without whom, as rajesh says, ‘this book would have been published a year ago’.
The secret to such a book is to know what’s interesting and ruthlessly marginalise anything that isn’t. although the couple spend several weeks trawling around europe, they don’t enjoy it much and rajesh mentions it only in passing.
Once they’re in russia, though, there’s rather more to talk about. Cities and countryside alike are entertainingly described, as are meals (many of them disgusting), as are the various loons and nutters they meet on the trains.
Never for a moment does any of it feel
forced or made up. This authenticity is hard-won, but without it a book like this crumbles to dust.
In Thailand she meets Joe, a middleaged man who has never been on a train before. ‘Watching Joe take pleasure in the unremarkable way the bunks pulled down or the lights switched off, I was reminded of why my passion for train travel deepened every time I boarded a train.
‘No matter how many journeys I took, or how awful the train, each one brought an element of surprise or wonder, usually to be found in the least expected places and people.’
She admits later that she prefers trains that are appalling, slow and useless. Japan’s bullet trains bore her. They get where they’re going far too quickly. This book is a slow journey, written carefully, and probably best read in smallish chunks over a few weeks, accompanied by a glass of something agreeable. As Rajesh herself realises, ‘the slowness of train travel had replenished my own mind, allowing me to pause and pick apart my thoughts — which, it turned out, were gratifyingly few. ‘Leaving my job, my home and my possessions had quietened the noise in my head. My immediate concerns were where to eat and where to sleep. The less I carried, the less I worried.’ Sounds a good recipe for life in general, I would say.