"The Amur River" by Colin Thubron

 Colin Thubron was born in 1939 and he is travelling in Outer Mongolia (on horseback) and Russia and China in 2020 (there is a reference to the Ukraine-Russia war) which makes him eighty! And travelling alone! On horseback (and taxi and car and riverboat and train and bus). He is amazing. (Like me, he's an Old Etonian, so we're not all like Boris.)

He travels the Amur river from the source of its longest tributary, the Onon (in a restricted area of Mongolia), into Siberia (where it is for a while the Shilka) and then along the Amur, for some time along the Russian-Chinese border and then later solely in Russian Siberia. The Mongolian section is lyrically natural, the Chinese parts thriving and full of agriculture, industry and lots of commerce, and the Russian sections depopulating, decaying and depressing, where old people eke out bleak existences in towns emptied of their young, and of hope.

The writing is wonderful; the achievement immense.

Selected quotes:

• Lyrical descriptions:
• "Across the heart of Asia, at the ancient convergence of steppe and forest, the grasslands of Mongolia move towards Siberia in a grey-green sea." (Ch 1; opening paragraph)
• "My shadow falls black over the grass." (Ch 1)
• "The young men are hefty boys with hedgehog hair." (Ch 7)
• "We walk in harsh wind along the river, whose esplanade stretches and bulges out as if for some grand future. Waves are slapping at its foot, seagulls crying, and two men bathe in the freezing shallows." (Ch 7)
• Masterful metaphors:
• "Vladik drives as if he's angry with the world." (Ch 3)
• "It is as if the words occupy a basement in his memory, and have to be pulled up one by one." (Ch 7)
• Cultural insights:
• "You can read in histories about what happened here, but often they are wrong ... it is people, not regimes or doctrines, that do these things." (Ch 2)
• "Always they are seen not as persons, but as a composite mass. Images of insects and pollutants abound." (Ch 6) Immigrants, Chinese in this case.
• "A culture less preserved than imprisoned ... as though to define and terminate a society by consigning it beneath glass: This will not return, this we have superseded." (Ch 9)
• "Mourners returning from funerals never looked behind them, for fear that the dead would overtake them and lodge in the village of the living." (Ch 10)
• "Soon the kitchen table is spread with black bread and red caviar, gherkins, wild garlic stalks, and some wandering ants." (Ch 8)
• Fascinating facts:
• "The source of great rivers is often obscure. They descend in a confusion of tributaries, or seep from inaccessible swamps and glaciers. ... The Danube, it is claimed, issues from a gutter in the Black Forest." (Ch 1) This resonated with me. When I walked the River Lee, I found its source was a concreted-over spring behind a couple of tower blocks in a suburb of Luton. The Thames oozes from a meadow in Gloucestershire.
• "Manchu ... belongs to the obscure Tungusic branch of the Altaic family, shared by Turkic peoples, Hungarians, Finns and Mongolians." (Ch 7)
• "Every few yards, across some random surface, a blackly gleaming carving appears. ... These figures are, literally, incalculably old. They belong to some distant Neolithic antiquity, perhaps six millennia ago ... The guide identifies a mystic boat - a slanted and corrugated line - which she tells me carried dead souls into the sky. ... But the most common subject, recurring at random, is a mask-like face with hollowed eyes and simian jaw, ringed by a sunburst of spokes." (Ch 9)
• "The strangest foretelling of the Amur's isolation - and its first known record in English - emerged as early as 1719 ... in The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe." (Ch 10)
• And even some humour from his last hotel room:
• "A fire notice on the door ... advises that if you cannot liquidate the burning, do not use the lift for avocation (there is no lift)." (Ch 10)

This is a brilliant book! What a great writer.

December 2022; 275 pages

Shortlisted for the 2021 Waterstones Book of the Year

Other travel (and exploration) books reviewed in this blog can be found by clicking here.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God