TRAVEL: IAN THOMSONreviews To a Mountain in TibetBy Colin Thubron Chatto & Windus, 227pp. £16.99
ONE DAY in June 2002, in the Himalayan kingdom of Nepal, the Nepali king and 12 of his family were slaughtered in their palace. As news of the massacre spread, rioters surged through the capital, Kathmandu, demanding the unknown killer’s execution. The culprit was exposed as Crown Prince Dipendra. Nicknamed “Nipple” at Eton school (a puerile corruption of “Nepal”), this unstable, hashish-smoking playboy had machine-gunned to death his own kin, then turned the weapon on himself. Though Nepal no longer has a monarchy, the massacre has left the country prey to Maoist insurgents and riven by distinctions of caste and clan.
Into this bereft and violent place comes the novelist and travel writer Colin Thubron. A restless, questioning spirit, Thubron notoriously delights in the lonesome frisson of travel. As he sets out on his journey from Kathmandu to Tibet, he encounters Nepalese traders, prostitutes and Buddhist monks. From these chance encounters he fashions a meticulous reportage tinged with poetry. Thubron's two marvellous accounts of Russia and China – Among the Russians and Behind the Wall– had likewise narrated the lives of ordinary people trapped beneath the crust of poverty and political upheaval. To a Mountain in Tibet, however, has a valedictory, death-haunted quality lacking in those earlier works.
Previously in his writing Thubron had in fact revealed very little of himself. That changed in 1999 with his masterwork, In Siberia, where he confessed that he was unmarried, childless and well past the terminal age for the average Russian male. (Thubron was then 60.) If anything, his new travel book is still more personal, amounting to an anguished personal quest and attempt to provide his life with meaning and justification.
Early on, Thubron confides that he set out on his Himalayan journey to allay the pain of bereavement. Fear-ridden reflections on his mother’s recent death haunt the narrative and bring out a strain of melancholy self-regard in Thubron, a descendent of the 18th-century poet John Dryden. In the unfrequented altitudes of Nepal, gasping for oxygen, his mind goes back to his mother as she lay artificially respirated in a hospital in Britain and the oxygen mask that had briefly re-animates her. He muses: “My mother died just now, it seems, not in the way she wished; my father before her; my sister before that, at the age of 21.” So Thurbon finds himself alone, the last of his family. Yet walking, in these pages, takes on a poetic, even sacramental aspect, as well as one of exertion and exhaustion. Perhaps by walking Thubron can exorcise the pain of his loss?
In the course of his journey northwards to Mount Kailas in the central Himalayas the author endures altitude sickness, as well as torn ligaments, blisters and a sore back. Unsurprisingly, the bodily and mental labour attendant on the journey brings on a hallucinatory exhaustion. "Nothing remains but this thread of oxygen. It is not enough," Thubron writes, adding moments later: "Only with consciously deepened inhalations has the shock passed, and the fragile trinity of heart, lungs and blood composed itself." Exquisitely written, To a Mountain in Tibetis not just a travelogue; it amounts to a heart-felt hosanna to the travails of walking.
In Thubron’s account, post-royalty Nepal remains a profoundly isolated and backward-looking society, hemmed in by the Tibetan plateau to the north, and by India to the south-west. Britain did not formally recognise Nepal until 1923, though Anglo-Nepalese relations strengthened during the second World War, when Gurkhas fought alongside the Allied Forces. Along the way, Thubron intrudes memories of his father, who had served in India as an army officer and gone big-game hunting in the Central Provinces. “Was it easier, in those times, to kill?” Thubron asks on contemplating his father’s Hemingway-like tally of bison, leopards and black bear. The slaughter might suggest a callous disregard for animal life at least.
Mountainside Nepalese, says Thubron, have a fearsome reputation and are not to be gainsaid. (A Gurkha restaurant in London used to boast “Service Not Included” on the menu above a picture of crossed kukris, the curved knives favoured for decapitations.) Undeterred, Thubron talks to yak-herders, tantric sooth-sayers and former Maoist insurrectionists.
These encounters are interspersed with pages of luminous, gem-like prose. In Kathmandu, memorably, a Nepali trekker’s face has “the lemony blandness of a sumo wrestler’s”; elsewhere, a huge gilded Buddha has a “smile of exalted absence”.
Mount Kailas, where Thubron arrives breathless and footsore at his journey’s end, lies shrouded in clouds and mystery. Its summit has never been scaled. Kailas is in fact the most sacred mountain in the world, circled by Hindu and Buddhist pilgrims, and the scene of otherworldly Tibetan funerary rites, where the dead are given up to vultures. Oxygen canisters lie discarded and undisturbed on the mountain slopes, as if they too had become holy, Thubron observes.
These days, travel has never been easier: just put it on the plastic and leave the answering machine on. Indeed, the riskiest part of travel is the drive to the airport. (Some airports even have "comfort zones" with dental clinics, cinemas and funeral parlours.) Colin Thubron, though, takes us back to the days of exploration when the going was rough. To a Mountain in Tibet,a matchless work of literary travel, confirms Thubron as a wise and discriminate prospector in the affairs of man, as well as a quite heroic walker.
Ian Thomson's biography of Primo Levi won the Royal Society of Literature WH Heinemann Award in 2003; his most recent book, The Dead Yard: Tales of Modern Jamaica, won the Ondaatje Prize 2010
