The Lost Heart of Asia (46 page)

Storks 65, 236

Sufism 62, 91-6, 245-6, 261, 262

Kazakhstan 317, 319-20

see also
Naqshbandi

Synagogue, Bukhara 98-9

Syr Dariya (Jaxartes) river 217, 229, 236, 360

 

Tajik people 56, 87, 88, 167, 238, 239, 274, 277, 302

Tajikistan 3, 218, 269-70

student in 283-5

Talib, lecturer, and family 286-9

Tamerlane (Timur Kurgan), emperor 54, 82, 99-100, 128, 146, 151, 160-3, 179-80, 253

death, and mausoleum 163-8

birthplace 188

White Palace, Shakhrisabz 188-90, 300

and Othman's Koran 211

water stoup in Turkestan 318

Tania (in Samarkand) 152-5, 170-5, 182-7

Tartar people 221

Tashkent, capital of Uzbekistan 198-202, 225

journey to 197-8

Russian waif in 197-8

capital of Russian Turkestan 199

Lenin Square 201, 215

playhouse 205-6

Moslem quarter 209-12

Imam Bukhari medreseh 209-10

residence of Grand Mufti 210-12

government 239

Tekesh, sultan of Khorezm 128

Tekke tribe (Turcoman) 20-1, 30

Tienshan mountains 55, 226, 320, 341, 342, 358, 360

Timur Kurgan
see
Tamerlane Timurid dynasty 179

Toloi, son of Genghiz Khan, and Merv 38

Transalai mountains 266, 267

Transoxiana 55

Turania (Greater Turkey) 119-20, 293

Turanian peoples 159

Turcoman art 15

Turcoman people 4, 6, 8, 17, 20, 239

and the Russians 10-11, 16

and Bukhara 82

Turkestan 88, 199

shrine of Sheikh Ahmad Yassawi 317-18

Turkestan town 315-16

Turkey feeling for, 117-21, 132, 167

and Armenia 121

Turkic people and Bukhara 72

and Kazakhstan 311

and Kirghizstan 356

and Tamerlane l6l, 167

Turkmenstan 1-32

independence 3

resources 4

 

Uighur people 119, 361

Ulug Beg 62, 148, 162, 165, 166, 179, 180

Medresehs 60-1, 73-6, 147

Umma
(Moslem community) 279-80

Unemployment, Samarkand 149

Urgench, capital of Khorezm 127-8

mausolea 127-9

Uzbek people 4, 54, 55, 62, 85, 87-8, 167-8, 238, 239, 318

and Bukhara 82

riots with Kirghiz 260-1

and Tajikistan 272

Uzbekistan 3, 55

Communists in 117-18

and Russia 58, 91

Uzgen town 263-4

 

Vambéry, Arminius 115

Veiled Prophet
see
Muqanna Vezir city 135

Victory Day, Samarkand celebrations 180-7

Vyatkin, Vladimir 180

 

War memorial, Ashkhabad 11

Water, holy springs in Bukhara 62

Wolff, Revd Joseph 84

Women and Islam 75-6, 284

in Bukhara 97

in old Bukhara 63-4

fire-worshippers 106

at Merv 39-40

Turcoman 17, 34

Wu Ti, emperor of China 260

 

Xinjiang mountains 239, 355, 360

Xinjiang province 119

 

Yagnob people 305-6

Yakut people 120

Yeltsin, Boris 365

Yurchi village 295-6

 

Zelim Khan, Bukhara artist 65, 67, 68, 70, 86, 89, 90-1, 103-4, 107

pictures 89-90

wife Gelia 65-71, 86-91

mother 66-70, 86, 88-9, 103-5, 107, 173

Zerafshan river 1, 62-3, 144, 302

Zoroaster, worship 62, 113, 304

Meet Colin Thubron

I HAVE WANTED TO WRITE since childhood. My mother must have had something to do with this. She came from the family of John Dryden, the first poet laureate of England, and encouraged my juvenile poetry. My father was an army officer, and was American on his mother's side, a descendant of Samuel Morse, inventor of the Morse code.

I had a privileged childhood, growing up in my parents' rural home in southeast England. But the British custom of sending children away to boarding school from the age of seven made for a hard, early lesson in self-sufficiency. These were the immediate postwar years (I was born in 1939), and life in Britain was still somber. But when I was eight my father was posted to Washington and Ottawa for four years, and the excitement of this new world, with the vastness of the North American landscapes, came like a revelation to a boy from war-drab England, and perhaps planted the first seeds of fascination with places abroad.

“ In late 1965 I took the plunge into full-time writing, and settled with an Arab family in Damascus to start my first travel book.”

In 1953 I went to Eton, a school that encouraged independence, and typically excelled in English and history, and failed at mathematics. By the time I left, in 1957, I knew only that I wanted to write. I went into publishing, spending four years with Hutchinson as a trainee, then assistant editor. For a year and a half afterwards my love of travel took me abroad making freelance documentaries for BBC television in Turkey, Morocco and Japan. This was followed by a brief return to publishing in New York (1964-1965) with Macmillan Publishers, as a production editor.

In late 1965 I took the plunge into fulltime writing, and settled with an Arab family in Damascus to start my first travel book.
Mirror to Damascus
was published in 1967, and was successful enough to open a future. Soon afterwards I traveled on foot through Lebanon for
The Hills of Adonis
(1968) and settled in Jerusalem in the year after the Six-Day War for
Jerusalem
(1969).

But I had always hankered after writing novels, and, after a grim apprenticeship with failed ideas, produced
The God in the Mountain
(1977), set in Cyprus, and a travel book on the island,
Journey into Cyprus
(1975). This was followed by a second novel,
Emperor,
a multifaceted story of the conversion of Constantine, and
A Cruel Madness
(winner of the Silver Pen Award in Britain), set in a mental hospital.

At that time my travel books had all been about geographically small places. Then, in 1978, something changed: a motor accident, a fractured spine, and some emotional sadness started a new direction. I decided to learn Russian and take a car into the Soviet Union, whose gray unchangingness (this was Brezhnev's time) made it an unlikely subject for a successful travel book. But I went in summer, spending the nights in student-run camps, and was only harassed by the KGB in my last weeks. The resulting book,
Among the Russians
(published in the United States as
Where Nights Are Longest)
coincided with a surge of popularity for the travel book genre in Britain, and gave me financial security.

In 1985, after studying Mandarin, I traveled through China at a time when the country was cautiously opening its doors. The resulting
Behind the Wall: A Journey Through China
won the Hawthornden Prize and the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, and was followed, in 1994, by a venture into the newly emerged Muslim republics of the broken-up Soviet Union for
The Lost Heart of Asia.
A long journey through the now-accessible Russian heartland produced
In Siberia
in 1999.

Throughout the past thirty years I have alternated travel books with novels. The two genres are often reactions against one another. The novels are introverted and intense—one, for instance, set in a mental hospital, another in a prison, another in an amnesiac's brain. I have published successively
Falling
(1989),
Turning Back the Sun
(1991),
Distance
(1996) and
To the Last City
(2002). These are stark, short tales, sometimes autobiographical in feeling, but not in plot.

The travel books, on the contrary, stem from a fascination with the outer world, often distant and little-known. My concentration on the lands of the old Soviet Union, on China, and on Islam reflected at first a romantic obsession with the great civilisations of Asia. But more recently, after
Among the Russians,
the books have grappled with the darker concerns and fears of my generation.

“ Throughout the past thirty years I have alternated travel books with novels. The two genres are often reactions against one another.”

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Strange Taste of Turkic Delight

The following article, written by Julia Llewellyn Smith, appeared in
The Times
(London), on October 5, 1994. Reprinted by permission of
The Times.

COLIN THUBRON , the man regularly described as our greatest living travel writer, insists on fourth-class railway carriages and barely blinks when he loses a tooth in a calf's-head stew.

Yet he comes home to a disappointingly comfortable corner of west London, all pastel-painted houses and twenty-fourhour delicatessens.

“Hello,” he says, opening the door of his garden flat. “Would you like some orange juice? I've got some that's fresh-ish in the fridge.” I was expecting camel's milk.

Never mind: inside the flat, Thubron inhabits a satisfying drabness of sludgy browns and shabby furniture that conforms to the image of a transitory resting place before the next adventure.

In fact, Thubron spends most of his time in London. Each travel book takes three years to write, but of that only four months are spent on the road. After that a place becomes familiar, and its impact dims. “The books tend to be adventures for me as well as for the readers,” he explains. “They are incursions into the unknown, and meant to express my own bewilderment and enlightenment.”

So far he has tried to pierce the “harrowing immensity” of Brezhnev's Russia in
Among the Russians,
and the “terribleness of Chinese history” in
Behind the Wall.
But these giants fade in inscrutability compared with his most recent trip into the five former Soviet republics of Central Asia. Most readers, after all, have at least heard of Leningrad and Shanghai, but few could claim to know the second city of Turkmenistan, let alone its history.

“Each travel book takes three years to write, but of that only four months are spent on the road.”

It was this mystery that drew in Thubron, at a time when the Tajik civil war was deterring the sturdiest of travellers. “I suppose to most people it's an enigma. It's so ill defined and it always has been. My preoccupation was the identity of these people in the break-up of the Soviet Union. You would suppose they would feel violently nationalistic or be willing converts to Islamic fundamentalism.”

His expectations were thwarted. The people he met generally had little national or religious feeling. Many even hankered for the days of the Soviet empire and the identity it gave them.

“None of them expected to be independent. The Georgians and Armenians were clamouring for it, but to these people nationalism had always been a rather shadowy concept. They have always had very loose allegiances. They think of themselves as a group or family, they don't feel Uzbek or Tajik. And Islam is a rather lukewarm element, mainly because the people are Turkic and think extremes are unmanly.”

He was uneasy in strange surroundings and expected these people to feel the same way. It is a shamefaced admission from a writer who is obsessively non-judgmental about his surroundings, to a point where detractors (rare) complain of soullessness.

People seem irresistibly compelled to confide in this gaunt, tanned man, with a face like a Crusader, and he listens without comment to the women moaning about their husbands and the young men who want to save his soul. Even the motorbike messenger who comes to the door as we are talking starts telling him how he skidded on some oil.

“ People seem irresistibly compelled to confide in this gaunt, tanned man, with a face like a Crusader, and he listens without comment to the women moaning about their husbands and the young men who want to save his soul.”

“Oh dear,” I hear Thubron saying patiently, before returning, muttering: “I wonder what all that was about.”

He doesn't seem particularly unhappy, perhaps because his bad experiences can be absorbed into his passion for words.

His looks, his old-Etonian charm and his rarity value as a single, heterosexual man of fifty-five have made him something of a pet with London ladies of a certain age. For the moment Thubron is attending their dinner parties, but soon he will decamp to Wales to start on his next novel. He alternates rigidly between travel writing and fiction, but says he prefers the latter. “With a travel book you are having to be true to something. The satisfaction of writing it seems to be diluted by the constant research back to your notes. With your novel, it's yours right or wrong, and that brings a peculiar satisfaction.”

Thubron's rights and wrongs manifest themselves in brief, “rather dark and sad studies of personal relationships.” He admits, without being asked, that his novels (the last was
Turning Back the Sun)
are “deeply autobiographical.” The idea for each novel festers for years and then emerges in “a short, sharp and obsessive four months.”

He doesn't seem particularly unhappy, perhaps because his bad experiences can be absorbed into his passion for words, just as he chooses the most arduous journeys knowing they will make the best copy. “I think I need some sort of constriction to kick up against, so that every conversation is a mini-triumph.”

The problem for Thubron is that he is running out of places where such challenges exist. “I feel I have come to the end of a certain pattern, that Central Asia has completed a jigsaw and in a way I'd rather not know where I'm going next. Once I start to know I think I'll start getting enthusiastic, and the next place will start saying ‘Me, me, me' and not letting go.”

A Critical Eye on
The Lost Heart of Asia

“Thubron generally sits in the front passenger seat, sets out alone across ruined heaps of Islamic tiling and fretted brick, and observes his anxious, ignorant and opinionated hosts from the corner of the room. His judgements are careful, and many of his landscapes precisely drawn . . . .
The Lost Heart of Asia
remains valuable, as a triple portrait in specific, historical time: of Russians outside Russia, a racist, but romantic imperialist people; of the native inheritors to whom they have (more or less) handed their power; and of the Islamic revivalists, some of whom are planning the next new world.”

—The Observer
(London), December 11,1994

“As a travel writer Thubron is not memorably crotchety like Paul Theroux or vividly opinionated like Martha Gellhorn. He is evenhanded and courteous, even to bores and lushes. But he is persistent in his curiosity, following obscure leads and dangerous roads (as in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan) to find the true heart of Asia.”

—Washington Post Book World,
November 20,1994

“This is magnificent stuff. The ferocious synthesizing force that is the Thubron bandwagon leaks vast amounts of substantial information on the obscure and secret worlds of nations, families and individuals, with all the seeming insouciance of a great entertainer. . . . What makes Colin Thubron so good? High readability for a start—as much of the pleasure principle as the spirit of scientific enquiry. He is a great user of human Alan Hollinghurst (“the Historian's face cracked into a smile which survived there a senselessly long time later, as if he had forgotten it”.) Another contributory factor is his thoroughly lived-in knowledge of the subject.”

—The Scotsman
(Edinburgh), October 29,1994

“Interweaving the history of the area with conversations he has along the way, Mr. Thubron gives a strong overall impression of the surface lethargy, the shallow economy, the pervasive unfocused homesickness of the new republics, all filtered through his lightly melancholy gaze. In spite of always being with local people, he can seem distant and evasive to them—not the Estonian they take him for, but the former Etonian, goading people by judicious silences into digging their own graves. Yet in culling vital memories, he has kept faith with one of the bewildered men he meets, who says: ‘Tell me about my country. You've read books. What happened here?'”

—New York Times,
December 4,1994

“This is the Soviet Union dissolved, chickens 200 roubles where they were two, and Thubron padding about the Islamic republics bemused (frequently bullied into vodka'ed drunkenness), overhearing frail domestic relationships, prodded by mercenary louts, and slipping his unchewable shashlik into the bushes. He is a mobile ear to listen again and again to the soft muddled narratives of real lives everywhere.”

—The Guardian
(London), December 2,1994

“Thubron's grasp of this fantastical past is impeccable, and he weaves its mysteries with modern images into a dazzling embroidery . . . . Thubron's talent for conversation gives his travels a tangible, moving intimacy, and despite his foreignness . . . he is able to draw confessions and opinions from an astonishing spectrum of people One of the striking aspects of
The Lost Heart of Asia
is, of course, the exceptional beauty of Thubron's writing. The profound, metaphorical quality of his style, the poetic surgeon's eye with which he dissects and reconstructs his surroundings, the humanity with which he interprets everything he sees, are deeply embedded in every line. His skill is in making reading an act of discovery, through which the dark, magical places he visits are genuinely brought to life.”

—The Times
(London), October 20, 1994

“No-one could better Colin Thubron's doleful elegance as recorder of the sad and potentially dangerous plight into which Central Asia has since fallen Thubron is happiest when he is saddest, picking his solitary way among poignant ruins and meditating on the fate of civilisations.”

—Financial Times
(London), October 15,1994

“It was the ideal moment for a travel writer. Thubron found a people who were openly asking fundamental questions about themselves: Who were they? What kind of government did they want? Should they follow Turkey's secular lead and form a new pan-Turkish block? Should they ally with the mullahs of Tehran and look to Islam for their answers? Should they revert to the certainties of Marxist-Leninism? Characteristically, Thubron refuses to give any answers. He has always been the most detached of modern English travel writers, a cool Anglo-Saxon observer who travels alone, has no ties and no loyalties, and who never judges. In this book, as in its predecessor, he simply presents a series of lives pinned dispassionately to paper like the butterflies of a Victorian colletor.”

—The Independent
(London), October 2,1994

“Although the heroic age of travelers in Central Asia has gone forever, this book will still deserve, for the intense beauty of its prose and the observant clarity of its vision, to stand alongside the best of those classic travel writings of the past.”

—The Sunday Telegraph
(London)