Shadow of the Silk Road - Colin Thubron

The "Silk Road" must be the most romanticised route in the world. It conjures up pictures from all of our fairy tales, of castles and minarets and oriental folk in strange garb. For me personally it conjures a hard-paved road I once walked in the foothills of the Annapurnas - a strange cart-scale highway across an expanse of nothing that led from a hill-pass to an impoverished town that reeked of faded grandeur echoed only now in the ornate ...
...when they straightened from bent work in the fields and the proud defiance of their menfolk who sat by and watched.

The road, of course, is no such thing. It is a vague notion of a route. It covers 7000 miles or more from Xian in the depths of China to Antioch, only just into Turkey and now called Antakya.

To cover the whole in a single journey is more ambition than even the agent merchants ever had. The eponymous silk ... more

The "Silk Road" must be the most romanticised route in the world. It conjures up pictures from all of our fairy tales, of castles and minarets and oriental folk in strange garb. For me personally it conjures a hard-paved road I once walked in the foothills of the Annapurnas - a strange cart-scale highway across an expanse of nothing that led from a hill-pass to an impoverished town that reeked of faded grandeur echoed only now in the ornate unpainted carved window shutters and in the gait of women when they straightened from bent work in the fields and the proud defiance of their menfolk who sat by and watched.

The road, of course, is no such thing. It is a vague notion of a route. It covers 7000 miles or more from Xian in the depths of China to Antioch, only just into Turkey and now called Antakya.

To cover the whole in a single journey is more ambition than even the agent merchants ever had. The eponymous silk that travelled this road in ancient times, would not have resided in a single merchant's pack the entire journey. It would have changed hands along the way, each time accruing the mark-up that made an already luxury item when it left the weaver's loom into something ruinous enough almost to bring down the Roman Empire by the time it had travelled a third of the way around the world.

Silk wasn't the only commodity to travel the route, obviously. There'd have been salt and spices; precious stones and crafted gems; pottery, and other fabrics, foodstuffs and wine. Above all, and most forgotten, there would have been ideas. Books perhaps in a past so distant that we western Europeans cannot conceive of the concept even existing then; religion certainly; notions of honour; ideas on warfare. Culture in its broadest and most pervasive wandered this road.

If Thubron had a purpose when he set out on this eight-month journey, it was almost certainly to examine that aspect of the road. Following the route, he says, "is to follow a ghost. It flows through the heart of Asia but it has officially vanished, leaving behind it the pattern of its restlessness: counterfeit borders, unmapped peoples.

Eight months is some commitment in the modern realms of travel. When Wilfred Thesiger or Gertrude Bell or the legendary Lawrence went a-wandering, it was accepted that an expedition would take years, but the world has shrunk since then. Or so we think. One of the clear messages from Thubron's latest adventures is that in some places, the shrinkage is barely noticeable.

The author compares his short adventure with the lives of the central Asian Sogdians who dominated the route for most of its heyday and would have spent their entire lives roaming parts of its length. One of these figments from the past he adopts as an imaginary interlocutor who wanders those half-wake moments of the tired traveller and questions the whole point of the journey, this journey in particular and journeying in general. (As if, perhaps, there could even BE a point.)

As it turned out, Thubron's eight months had to be split. Fighting in northern Afghanistan halted the original journey, which was then picked up 12 months on. The break is acknowledged in the preambles, but totally missable in the text which flows from one place to the next.

Those accustomed to the modern style of travel writing, the journalistic experience of the road, might find the thought of even reading about such a journey daunting. Thubron is not of the modern tradition however. He belongs to the earlier age of explorers, whose aim is to share what the found, and only allow its personal effect to escape accidentally.

What results is over three hundred pages of the most poetic elegiac writing you will ever find in a prose work.

It is - as others have said - haunting, melancholy, magical, profound, exquisite.

The passage of time is scarcely marked, other than occasional seasonal references. We are offered days upon days in a place, but then skip 85 miles or 4 days, or further or longer. In commenting on Butcher's "Blood River" I commended the realistic rendition of travelling itself, but it would have been out of place here. Thubron's style and skill rests with the Fitzgerald's of this world, those who take one form of poetry and create another with only the necessary regard for its factual base. The grinding detail can be smoothed, ignored, or turned to humour or its own kind of beauty…but should not ever remain simple, grinding, detail. It is mostly travellers who read about travel and we can fill in the blanks.

We will not all have suffered near-death at the hands of a drunk-driver (ours) or been quarantined in a remote ex-labour-camp, felt the need to gouge out our mosi-guard bottles to hide our cash. But we probably fantasise about such uncomfortable minor heroisms of the road. We will have slept in places as bad or worse and realised that really we cannot compete.

Thubron's rendition shares the more humourous sides of dealing with authority in places where it is genuinely terrifying - but the mundane difficulties of negotiating the next stage when you have no shared language are trade secrets he keeps to himself.

The book is full of the history and mythology of those places he passes through: the discovery of silk and its dissemination slowly to the west; how Islam grew and spread East and West…and so, Buddhism, Christianity and the sects and schisms of all such influences.

He visits tombs that are lost to the naked eye, and those rebuilt in gaudy fashion. In remote deserts and forgotten towns, he finds evidence of the dead. Skeletons that have survived in their silks for millennia. And shipment container prisons rusting their evidence into nothing.

Among the living traditions of hospitality live on strongest amongst those who have least. Religions are held to fiercely - or scarcely noted.

But it is also full of the people he meets. And it is the people that speak loudest, and most sadly. The one overriding impression I was left with was how ill-served the many once-glorious peoples of the planet have been served by their rulers, their politics and their religions….and how likely it is that we will find ourselves lamenting in their place at some point.

National boundaries mean nothing when tribes are mobile…people hold to their stories. My home-county tales of the missing Legion along Hadrian 's Wall, fade to insignificance in the light of entire generations of blonde(ish), blue-eyed, pale-skinned Chinese who have legends of a captive foreign force from beyond the wall.

The Chinese assuage their guilt of the years of the Cultural Revolution by rose-tinted renditions of the security and prosperity of the communist years. The yearning for expressive freedom among the up-coming generations, the desire for all things western, is still quietened by the propaganda-fed belief (or doubt) in the immorality of our lifestyle.

The Kyrgyz fear that having accidentally become independent on the protests of the other ex-Soviet states and the collapse of a system without their active participation, they have no true fought-for identity. They fall back on a mythological hero from time out of mind. (Why not? It seems to work for the English who hold to Arthur as their unifying force far more than any proven event or hero.)

Iran and Iraq. Wars and governments. Betrayals and hope.

Most touching for me, the stories of the Afghans. I remember the mujahedeen struggle against the Soviets and how we admired their fierce independence. Now it is our soldiers dying in the un-ironic poppy-fields and I have somehow lost the plot.

Perhaps it is just that only the lost, the lonely, the haunted and the fiercely angry people who seek out the traveller to talk to him and share their own tales. Perhaps the happy people do not need their stories to be told beyond their natural reach. Perhaps there is this inbuilt bias to travellers' tales, that they will only ever be part of the truth: but a part that should be heard, all the same.

And if even this wasn't a book full of truths about how the world once was and how it is now, and intimations of what it will most likely become….it would still be worth the reading.

He speaks of the "ghosts of old plaster", of silken-clad women flooding "the pavements in a broken rainbow…[with] the beauty of long hands…more erotic than nakedness". Conversations "swarm with question marks" and a train becomes "a snake glimmering through emptiness".

Or on reaching civilisation again: "I found myself walking on smooth footways, barely a paving slab torn up, past traffic that stopped at red-lights, sometimes, on horseless streets…buildings with whole upper storeys intact"

It is impossible not to be captivated.

~

Published in paperback by Vintage
ISBN 978-0-099-43722-2
pp 344 plus maps, timeline & index
Cover price £8.99

~

© Lesley Mason
hiker@Ciao
13.7.08 

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