The Amur is the eighth or tenth longest river in the world, depending on whom you believe. The veteran travel writer and novelist Colin Thubron reckons 2,826 miles the best estimate. In these pages he makes an arc-shaped journey from source to mouth: Mongolia to the Pacific via Russia and China.
The author travels on horseback, buses, pontoon rafts, boats, trains and in taxis and the vehicles of strangers. Starting in late August, he breaks off in Khabarovsk, the largest city on the Amur (population 500,000), returning home to London when the river freezes. As book and journey progress, the Amur changes its name and gender. Mongolian horsemen know it as Onon, the Holy Mother, Siberians as Shilka, Russians as Little Father, and in China it becomes the Heilongjiang, or Black Dragon River.
Menace and foreboding stalk the steppe. The Amur River’s first page alone has the words, ‘forbidden’, ‘formidable’, ‘mistrust’ and ‘razor wire’. The waterway follows the longest fortified frontier on Earth, one that runs through deeply contested badlands, and it is not surprising that for Thubron, entering his ninth decade, ‘a rankling unease’ persists. Furthermore, early on he sustains two fractured ribs and a broken fibula. ‘I knew I was weakening,’ he writes before chapter one draws to a close. Seventy pages later he notes to himself: ‘You wonder if you should go home.’
For 1,000 miles the Amur forms the border between Russia and China, and ‘an old paranoia haunts this frontier’
Thubron has published ten travel books, six covering regions of Russia and China shattered by pocket demagogues and ancient history. In this latest he again summons both landscape and people with nuanced sensitivity. The reader sniffs footwear steaming by the campfire alongside horse blankets, hears the cry of a wolf in the night (‘a thread of sound’), and at the head of a pass in the Shilkonsky massif glimpses a clump of birch trees that ‘shivers with votive flags’.
Thubron keeps himself on the sidelines, as a travel writer must, only occasionally splashing the prose with lyrical reflection (‘the land’s human emptiness and its deep silence stir a pang of wonder, as if the world were young again’).
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in