A very satisfying read indeed!

For the last couple of months I have been reading Paul Theroux's new book 'Ghost Train to the Eastern Star' and I really recommend it if you like perceptive travel writing and a style that creates images. Paul Theroux is an honest writer and on occasions bares his soul to add enticing reasoning about the situations he find himself in. I guess he is just an ordinary bloke but he has a special gift of explaining in just a few words where others, perhaps myself included, will take many more and still fail to make the point or capture the moment.

This book is about his retracing the steps of a train journey he made in the early seventies through Asia and Russia. Although today's political map means that he cannot retrace exactly there are significant sections he travels through again and on his way he re-counts the many differences between then and now. Hardly an original idea but the style and the observations make compelling reading.

There is a large section on his experiences in Singapore and in it he makes a catalogue of observations and comments about how the city has developed and changed, or not, in the thirty years or so since he last visited. I have a high regard for Singapore and I found myself questioning his sentiment, but I also found myself agreeing with some of his comments and I began to question my assumptions. Do I know the Singapore that Mr Theroux describes? Over the next few blogs I will attempt to answer this searching question and hopefully challenge the master of travel literature.