The latest book from travel writer and novelist Paul Theroux, The Last Train to Zona Verde: Overland from Cape Town to Angola (Hamish Hamilton, £11.99), is a return both to Africa and to the perennial motif of the railway (present since his first book of travel, The Great Railway Bazaar, in 1975). The book is, in the words of its inside-cover, "an ode to the last African journey of the world’s most celebrated travel writer."
In the current issue of Prospect, Raymond Tallis describes (£) the book as "a reminder of the world below the tourist radar," an "absorbing" read that "leaves its mark." But Tallis had problems with Theroux’s "irritating superiority," a criticism shared by Joshua Hammer in the New York Times, who comments that "advancing age seems only to have intensified his cantakerousness." Hammer, however, praises Theroux’s style, noting that "much of this trip is a dispiriting slog through squalid bus stations and urban slums, enlivened by Theroux’s vivid evocations of misery as well as by his moral outrage." He identifies a compelling blend of squalid subject matter and good writing, something that also drew the esteem of Anthony Sattin in the Spectator, for whom the book "packs plenty of bang" in its "brutal honesty."
Robin McKie, in The Observer, presents the book as "a riveting, chilling read," "an uncompromising, unsettling work," and "an extraordinary, terrifying vision." Adjusting the distinction between subject and style, McKie writes that the topics under discussion tend towards the hackneyed and predictable, mitigated only by Theroux’s "tight, angry prose."
For Hedley Twidle in the New Statesman, this anger figures rather less forgivingly as "a welter of Afro-pessimism"; the writing as ‘the disconnected notes that a grumpy old man writes up each evening in his hotel." Where McKie found that the book "outlines a reality that sometimes seems more like the apocalyptic fiction of writers such as Cormac McCarthy," Twidle felt compelled "to pretend that we were in a different genre, to keep imagining the book as a comic novel with a deliberately unlikeable narrator," so exhausted was he by a doominess that "out-Naipauls both Naipauls and makes even Conrad’s Marlow seem fairly chipper."
In one particularly coruscating passage, Twidle contends that
"Bankrupt in more ways than one, then, this is a book I would recommend only as a teaching aid or to someone interested in tracking the final sub-Conradian wreckage of a genre, rusting away like the hulks of tanks that so fascinate the narrator along the roads in Angola. It is imbued not just with the narrator’s old age but the senescence of an entire genre." Perhaps Theroux’s final report from the continent that has structured his writing career, the manner and style of The Last Train to Zona Verde has divided the critics. But in amongst the anger there is, however, general agreement with Tallis that for the more resolute reader "the reward is to be taken into the interstices of an infinitely varied continent."
