Research for Colin Thubron's latest novel took him to a religious retreat in India, among other places. Photo / 123RF
The travel writer Colin Thubron tells John Preston what drives him to the world's most remote outposts
Even if you saw him striding down a nondescript suburban street, you might guess that Colin Thubron was a great adventurer. He may be 77, but there is something about his lean, sculpted features that tells of long months spent in the back of beyond. His pale blue eyes seem permanently fixed on a far horizon, while his feet, unexpectedly bound up in sandals, have a sturdy, utilitarian look.
A CBE and president of the Royal Society of Literature, Thubron is one of the last survivors of the golden age of British travel writing. Several of his books, including Behind the Wall: A Journey Through China — in which he walked and rode a bicycle across China — and In Siberia — an equally arduous journey across Russia's "forbidden world" — have become undisputed classics.
But there is more to him than that. In between his excursions, Thubron has also written a clutch of highly regarded novels. He once described these as "anti-travel books": in some of them, his characters barely step outside.
His latest, Night of Fire, is rather different. A deeply personal, characteristically ambitious book to do with memory, childhood and the possibility of an afterlife — among other things — it entailed research trips to a refugee camp in Malawi, a religious retreat in India and a hospital in Cardiff. There, he watched a neurosurgeon cut a cancerous tumour out of a patient's brain. As Thubron stood in his scrubs, peering into someone's head, he found himself pondering the nature of identity.
"I'm not particularly squeamish, so I didn't feel faint — I was just fascinated. Here was this gently pulsating mass threaded by 100,000 miles of blood vessels — and that's us. There's nothing more intimate than seeing that, and yet nothing more estranging, too, because to me it just looked like a bunch of sausages."
In Night of Fire, Thubron writes of one of his characters, "Travel was his vice, his addiction. Or else he was trying to escape something."
I ask how true that was of him.
"Ah..." he says. There's quite a long pause.
"Travel has always been a kind of addiction for me, but I've never thought of it as an escape. That's been something that people have often said to me — what are you escaping from? But, if anything, I think I'm confronting the world when I travel. For me, staying at home has much more to do with escape.
"It all goes back to childhood, he suspects. His father worked in Canada and America just after the war, and at the end of every term Thubron would leave first his prep school — and then Eton — to travel across the Atlantic in a beaten-up cruise liner.
"Imagine a child out of war-torn London seeing the neon lights of New York for the first time. Suddenly you were in this extraordinary world, instead of the horrid little gorse heaths of Ascot."
Thubron has a faintly guttural voice and the word "horrid" comes off his tongue like a drum roll.
"School was boring as far as I was concerned, and so was home. Abroad was exciting."
While Thubron may have gone on to Eton, his life since has been anything but feather-bedded. Instead he seems to relish discomfort, to have sought out the rockiest road he could find.
"I've never thought of myself as ascetic; I just sort of don't care. For instance, if I was on a nice holiday on the Costa del Sol, I'd be as fussy as anyone else. But travelling in the kinds of areas I do, I've never cared about where I'm putting up for the night. All those things that might seem like deprivation to other people don't matter to me. I think I'm fairly tough and I'm not hedonistic; I can get by with very little. Mind you," he says, gesturing around his comfortable, immaculately ordered Holland Park flat, "this may seem to deny it."
Nor, in his own distinct way, is he a stranger to stylishness. Three years ago, he even made it on to The Times' best-dressed list, coming in at No. 39, apparently combining "Hugh Grant foppishness with added intellect".
When I tell him this, his eyebrows shoot up. "Good god," he exclaims. "How extraordinary. My wife is always accusing me of being sloppily dressed, so I must tell her."
Thubron's first book, Mirror to Damascus, published in 1967, was the first about Syria written in English for 100 years. It also set the tone for much of his later work. Never an overtly political writer, Thubron captures the spirit of a place by more oblique means: immersing himself in its culture, venturing to its forgotten outposts and meeting its — often marginalised — people.
It is also extremely funny. In the opening pages, a man follows Thubron up Mount Kassioun, above Damascus. What will he do in the city for so many months, the man would like to know: "'What is wrong with New York?' (A foreigner is always American here.)"
The Syrian wistfully tells him he should have gone to Beirut instead, for the women.
"'You know that in Damascus you sleep alone... But the orchards here; look at the trees. You don't find trees like this anywhere, God be praised. It's a paradise...' He said goodbye, saluting with a hand whose skin was cracked like tree-bark, and his legs, as he started down the edge of the hill, were wire-drawn and repulsive, like the sinews of Signorelli devils."
I ask Thubron whether he has been back to Syria since.
"Never, never..." he says glumly.
"And I've fallen out of touch with everyone I knew there. Inevitably, you wonder what has happened to them."
He went on to write a lot about other parts of the Middle East — Turkey, Iraq and Lebanon — so I ask him what he made of the Chilcot report.
"Well, I was glad it came out as toughly as it did. It just seems extraordinary to me that Blair never listened to the people who knew about the culture he was intruding on. People who would have said to him, 'Don't do this'." He shakes his head. "Madness, just madness."
Thubron says he is not a naturally brave person.
"The trouble is there's always this aspect that you've funked it if you don't go that bit farther. For instance, when I was in Siberia, I heard about this village that had been virtually abandoned by the Soviet authorities, full of Russian drunks and ne'er-do-wells. It was so hard to get to that a Russian tanker had to drop me off — only in Russia would they stop an entire oil tanker to let off this half-witted traveller.
"When I got there, I met this extraordinary doctor, abandoned in the middle of nowhere, trying to look after these people. It rather confirmed my belief that in order to get good material you've got to venture to extremes."
Nor, he says, has he actively gone in search of danger. Inevitably, though, he has had some hairy moments along the way.
"There have been times when I've feared for my life, but not many. Once, in Morocco, someone put a gun to my head" — Thubron, typically, never bothered to write about it.
"And I was attacked by Palestinian refugees in the Middle East. A bit ironic since I'm pro-Palestinian. But it wasn't very threatening because the poor fellows, they were so... small."
For years Thubron was a kind of lone wolf, always travelling alone, unencumbered by marriage, children or any of the stuff that keeps most people chained to their hearths — until, in 2010, aged 71, he married the Shakespeare scholar Margreta de Grazia.
Was staying single a deliberate decision on his part?
"Actually, it was more happenstance. Until my early 30s I was obsessed by my career and then I was in love with an unpromising person from the point of view of marriage. But then I wasn't very good marriage material — there was always a heavy level of independence."
As a child, Thubron says, his greatest ambition was to see everything that was beautiful and strange in the world. At 77, this urge remains as strong as ever. Although he has only just recovered from a knee operation, he is already planning a trip down the Amur River — the 10th-longest river in the world, which rises in Mongolia and flows into the Pacific, 2736 kilometres later.
"I want to go in part because it's so little known — no one has ever done it before."
Before Thubron goes, he is going to have to brush up on his Russian (rusty) and his Mandarin Chinese (even rustier).
"Being able to talk to people is the most important thing of all for me, otherwise you can't find out what's going on..."
He breaks off and his gaze drifts to the farthest reaches of his living room.
"The older I've become, the more I've realised that there's only one deprivation I really care about — and that's lack of information."
• Night of Fire by Colin Thubron, RRP $50.
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