Travel: Still on her bike in her 70s, Dervla Murphy describes the same timeless Siberia as Dostoevsky, writes Ian Thomson.
Born in 1931, Dervla Murphy is still cycling strong in her seventh decade. Her 19th travel book about a journey undertaken on a bicycle explores the frozen immensity of Siberia and its snow-laden tundras. Named after the Tartar sibir (sleeping land), Siberia is bigger than the United States and western Europe combined. Where is its heart? To Murphy, Siberia is "somewhere else - its own place". Rasputin lookalikes, religious shamans and Gulag survivors create an image of Siberia as a fairy tale nowhere. Predictably Murphy finds the post-communist Tartar territories in perilous upheaval, simmering in a stew of uncontrolled private enterprise, orthodox fundamentalism and booze-inflamed nostalgia for the Czars.
Though somewhat meandering, Through Siberia by Accident is often informative. Siberians are mostly dark-haired but they are not the hirsute descendants of Ghengis Khan. The late (though admittedly peroxided) Raisa Gorbachev was herself from Siberia. Murphy is an open-minded guide, yet she was decidedly brave to write an account of Siberia barely four years after the appearance of Colin Thubron's In Siberia. Few can rival Thubron for his meticulous reportage and exquisite literary craft, and Murphy is not a writer of great poise or style. Through Siberia by Accident is often marred by lazy approximations such as "fiftyish", "laidbackness", "brunching", and by clichéd words ("sophisticated", "serendipitous") which more careful writers would avoid. Moreover, we learn far too much about Murphy's mishaps and numerous ailments as she trundles past the world's deepest lake - the mythical Baikal - and other Siberian landmarks. Her knee plays up; her calf muscles throb; she says she misses her cats, and at one point she informs us: "I sordidly peed in my pants".
The author is hampered, too, by the limitations of her chosen means of travel. By the late 1980s literary travel had been discredited by a glut of yarns with titles such as Hang-gliding to Borneo. The writers, keen to simulate the hardship of Victorian exploration, imposed artificial difficulties on themselves: they rode horses, morobikes and . . . bicycles. Fortunately, Murphy abandons her bicycle when the Siberian terrain obliges her to take a bus or train. Yet the bicycle - tweely named "Pushkin" - remains a presence. Fortunately these irritations are counterbalanced by pages on Siberian shamans, reindeers and drunkeness.
Appallingly, Siberian children drink vodka at the age of 12, while their parents roam drunkenly for reindeer meat in the snow. (But the reindeer pastures are ruined by acid rain.) All this, while the local mafia grow fat on imported delicacies. Siberia's abandoned Gualg sites still overwhelm with their sense of past suffering, yet how is Murphy qualified to speak of the Gulag? My mother, as a Russian Balt persecuted by Stalin, lost friends to the Siberian ice-fields. Among them was the Tallinn lawyer Arnold Susi, a key figure in Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago. (In 1945, Susi vanished in the deeps of Novosibirsk, a statistic among the millions of Siberian dead.)
Murphy's Siberia journey was supposed to be a "light-hearted" holiday, she says, after the ordeal of writing her previous book about the war-torn Balkans (Through the Embers of Chaos). Yet Siberia is scarcely an ideal holiday destination. Vodka is one problem, heroin another. Drug abuse is especially rife in the old Soviet-style industrial complexes of Siberia, and AIDS is contracted chiefly through shared syringes. Elderly Siberians despair of the junkies: those whom heroin spares now, they say, the virus will take later.
Around the Siberian city of Norilsk temperatures can plummet to 30 degrees below zero. Its feared Gulag archipelago saw many brutal maimings, murders and tortures. Yet it is hard for post-communist Russia to conceive of these political deaths (an estimated 63 million in the 70 years after the 1917 Revolution) as being in the name of progress. Siberia is still waiting for a miracle, and the presence of McDonald's in Vladivostok or Novosibirsk is not enough to convince the population that the West is the best. The Siberia as described by Dervla Murphy is the same timeless land that Dostoevsky described in his great prison memoir, The House of the Dead, where cruelty is accompanied by sentimentality, and the poor remain dirt poor.
Ian Thomson recently won the Royal Society of Literature Heinemann Prize for his biography of Primo Levi.
Through Siberia by Accident. By Dervla Murphy, John Murray, 302pp. £18.99