[The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas] is a sequel to the author's superbly entertaining The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train Through Asia. Longer than its predecessor, and a good deal grimmer, it has fewer comic moments to divert us from the poverty Mr. Theroux everywhere encounters and which, since he speaks Spanish, is not so forgettably anonymous as the Asian distress that figured as little more than dusky scenery in the Railway Bazaar. I suspect that this book was also harder to write, since here Theroux was not inventing a form for a novel experience but uninspiredly following his old literary tracks. It is certainly harder to read. Theroux's prose is as sheerly enjoyable as ever and his insights into individual and social character are as fresh and penetrating, but the vagaries of rail travel in Latin America repeatedly tempt him to ramble from the main line of his narrative, and the book is a bit bloated in consequence. Theroux's padding, however, is always lively and intelligent, so it seems ungrateful to complain. What is it, then, that makes this book difficult, at once less entertaining and more interesting than the Railway Bazaar? It is, I think, the morally ironic contrast between the human misery Theroux observes and his will to make art and money out of rendering it, an irony that is echoed in our will to enjoy ourselves as much as we did on his earlier trip, and damn the disquieting disparity between us and the direly poor peasants we glimpse on every page. (p. 54)
Theroux may be blind to the irony of his own situation, but his eye for irony is otherwise acute. To be sure, he is not above making such easy notations as that Jesus is always pictured as a gringo on the Mexican postcards, or that (following the cue of Aldous Huxley) there is no progress visible in Progresso, no rancho in Rancho, and appallingly little democracy in Democracia. But he also makes more resonant observations—for example, that whereas the mud huts in Guatemala are not built to withstand earthquakes, the tombstones of the dead are. And in an objective description, he can seem to catch the whole unhappy fate of a people, as in this Keatsian image of a church window in earthquake-ravaged Guatemala City: "Tremors left cracks between windows and separated, in the stained glass of those windows, the shepherd from his little flock, the saint from his gold staff, the martyr from his persecutors." (pp. 54-5)
Jack Beatty, "Books and the Arts: 'The Old Patagonian Express'," in The New Republic (reprinted by permission of The New Republic; © 1979 The New Republic, Inc.), Vol. 181, No. 12, September 22, 1979, pp. 54-5.
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