"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 as though to define and terminate a society by consigning it beneath glass: This will not return, this we have superseded."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

"The Incredible Mile" by Harold Elvin

In 1968 Mr Elvin decided to travel from St Pancras to Euston, mostly by rail, via Newcastle, Bergen, Stockholm, Helsinki, Moscow, Irkutsk, Nakhoda (near Vladivostok), Ulan Bator, Taskkent, Samarkand, Sochi, Odessa, Istanbul and Paris. This is a travelogue about his experiences, mostly aboard the trans-Siberian express.

He has a fascinating way of writing with many more sentence fragments than usual. For example, "I went with a driver so mad for speed and so uninterested in pot-holes, chickens, sheep, barriers like road repairs, that my only excuse for remaining alive is that I must be a cat." (C 76) This misses out an 'and' in the list which makes it sound more clipped and urgent. This can be quite poetic (and occasionally irritating).

More urgency is added by the device of using 93 chapters (on average each chapter is less than three pages long).

On the other hand, I wanted more. Much of what he writes about are his experiences with the people aboard the train and in the towns he gets to. I wanted more, much more, about the places he visited. This book is a taster to an incredible journey but I wanted the main course ... and spuds.

There are some wonderful moments:

• "Instead of signals, at hundreds of points down the line, were the frailest little women with sad little flags." (C 16)
• "We finished the last of the toilet paper at Omsk. After that it was each man for himself." (C 16)
• "All seemed convinced that the communist countries were a bastion of goodness surrounded by a sinister war-mongering ferment of degradation against which a constant alert was needed." (C 36)
• The Tsatangs of NW Mongolia herd white reindeer and build tents just like the Lapps
• "Most countries have come in from the out-of-doors, got snug in houses and created an art which is part of the snugness. Chopin is drawing-room matter, not steppe and desert matter." (C 49)

There are some brilliant descriptions:

• "The man so thin he'd have to try twice to make a shadow" (C 3)
• "We were a blood cell running down an artery, our train down our railway track was the one live contact all these lands had with the outer world." (C 5)
• "The festers that men create by beauty spots." (C 17)
• "A croaky voice as if a frog with a cold lodged in her throat." (C 26)
• "For the irreligious ... these churches were living theatres at their richest." (C 35)
• "Our waitress has an early-Bardot walk. She was seventeen. Where her top lip joined her lower lip were two wells the breadth of sixpences out of which smiles radiated in ever-increasing circles across her face lighting up anyone's spirit who happened to be noticing. Her smiles' timetable was two per minute. Any suitor must have only one ambition: to keep that time-table up to scratch." (C 39)
• "A man, looking as if he had been poured into his clothes and someone had forgotten to say 'when'" (C 86)

There are some great sayings:

• "All girls are good, so where do the horrible wives come from?" (C 7)
• "In the city the man is master. In the country the land is master." (C 12)
• "It is a law that what an individual or a public asserts for itself can usually be taken as the opposite. Whoever heard of a generous man saying he was generous, or a brave man acclaiming his bravery: yet the mean and the coward do nothing else." (C 27)
• "Anything faster than walking is an insult to the territory you pass over." (C 41)
• "How can a man with a full stomach pass judgement on a hungry thief?" (C 69)
• "Like trying to smuggle day in past a rooster." (C 86)
• "As worn out an an old woodpecker in a petrified forest." (C 86)

A fascinating journey at a fascinating moment in Cold War history; while the author is in Siberia the Russians tanks entered Czechoslovakia.

December 2019; 255 pages

Other books on travel, exploration and explorers, which are reviewed in this blog, may be found here.

My parents were members of the Readers Union Book Club. They must have had a great person to choose the books. This is one of the many I have enjoyed and reviewed in this blog. Here is a list:

• Life with Ionides by Margaret Lane: about a man catching snakes in East Africa
• The Golden Isthmus: the history of Panama from its discovery by Europeans
• The Incredible Mile by Harold Elvin: the travelogue of a journey on the Trans Siberian express
• A Pattern of Islands by Arthur Grimble: the memoir of a Colonial Officer on the Gilbert and Ellice Islands
• Invasion 1940 by Peter Fleming: an account of Britain's unpreparedness and preparation for a Nazi invasion
• Bus Stop Symi by William Travis: three years lived on the sometimes less than idyllic Greek island of Symi
• A Memoir of the Bobotes by Joyce Cary: a memoir of time spent in the Balkan Wars (before the First World War)
• The Great Trek by Oliver Ransford: a history of the formation of the Orange Free State and Transvaal by Boer farmers trekking from the Cape Colony

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