The land of the barefoot and hard-up

A decade ago Theroux travelled from Cairo to Cape Town for his book Dark Star Safari. Now, over 70,  he picks up where he left off, intending to go from Cape Town overland up the west coast of Africa. It is a melancholic, farewell journey which threatens to be his final travel book of this type - but he still succeeds in his inimitable way, getting better the more detours he makes, says Jerome Boyd Maunsell
Some kids stand at the Boa Vista slum, in the outskirts of Luanda, on August 31, 2012. The ruling Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola party (MPLA) of President Jose Eduardo dos Santos, which has been in power since independence 37 years ago, compete today in the legislative poll against 8 other political parties, including the main opposition Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA). Dos Santos promised that with a new term he would push ahead with his multi-billion-dollar drive to rebuild the country after the civil war that ended a decade ago. MPLA is widely expecting to win the elections and beat the UNITA former rebel movement which does not have the same access to funds or the state-controlled media.
Stephane De Sakutin/AFP/GettyImages)

The Last Train to Zona Verde: Overland From Cape Town to Angola
by Paul Theroux
(Hamish Hamilton, £20)

In his travel books, more obviously so than in his fiction, Paul Theroux likes to work hard for the reader. He has made a long career of travel as slog, writing (unlike, say, Bruce Chatwin or VS Naipaul) not only about the revelations but the tedium and frustrations of voyaging. The word “travel”, as Theroux surely knows, can be traced back to “travail”, or work, and it’s in this arduous spirit, as much as with a lust for adventure, that Theroux has set off on many journeys.

He takes the long way round — often using local buses or trains — “tramping out a book” with his feet. There’s an innate naturalness to the writing in his travel books; a devil-may-care outspokenness and unpretentiousness; a willingness to talk to people met by chance and to wander without a plan; a knack for sketching in little digressions on history, people, literature.

Theroux is still at it, compulsively, though now over 70 — “way past retirement age”, as he gruffly reminds us in The Last Train to Zona Verde, a melancholic, farewell journey even from the outset, which threatens to be his final travel book of this type. More than 10 years ago Theroux travelled from Cairo to Cape Town for Dark Star Safari. Now he picks up where he left off, intending to go from Cape Town overland up the west coast of Africa.

Where Dark Star Safari was a whistlestop tour, from the north to the south of Africa, Zona Verde is smaller in focus, homing in on three countries: South Africa, Namibia and Angola. The shrunken scale of Theroux’s travelling here, it turns out, is by accident rather than design. Yet it results in a more intense level of detail — also ascribed by Theroux to age: “There was a finality in my way of looking now, a gaze with more remembering in it,” he writes.

Zona Verde rambles rather aimlessly initially. Staying in a luxury hotel, Theroux revisits townships in Cape Town he wrote about before, wanting to see how things have changed — mostly for the better, he discovers, although new slums have sprung up elsewhere. In Namibia, he writes of the Ju/’hoansi people, and later, uncharacteristically, touristically, gushes about an elephant safari. The prose sometimes droops (“Namibia is a land of extremes”) or over-generalises (“In Africa… every city is the same”). Theroux marches on. In the bush in Angola, “zona verde”, his narrative finally finds its feet, in “the old Africa of mud huts, twig fences, bony cows, strutting roosters, and no lights — of the barefoot and the hard-up”. Angola, oil and diamond-rich yet desperately poor for most, takes over the book.

Theroux is doubt-ridden throughout this self-consciously valedictory journey, questioning his own voyeurism, superficiality and whimsicality. “What am I doing here?” — the question Rimbaud asked in Aden in 1884 — stalks the entire trip, leading Theroux to abandon plans to travel on to Timbuktu, in an odd, truncated end. More self-aware than usual, he also seems more despondent about his own project, about urban Africa, and about travel writing generally — an art of surfaces that can still say more sometimes than the inside view.

But in some reflective passages Theroux defends the genre, and thus his life’s work. “I have always felt that the value of a travel narrative, especially one that detours down back roads, is that it becomes a record of details of how people lived at a particular time and place”.

Theroux still does all this inimitably, and more, getting better the more detours he takes. It’s a shame to see him laying down his notebooks here, unwilling to go on.

Go to standard.co.uk/booksdirect to buy this book for £16, or phone 0843 060 0029, free UK p&p

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