Paul Theroux has produced some of the best travel books of the past 50 years, and some of the lamest. His latest work shrieks swansong, from its title — The Last Train — to the acknowledgement that he has reached ‘the end of this sort of travel, marinated in politics and urban wreckage’, to the closing words with which he ‘felt beckoned home’. So, if this is the last of Theroux as epic traveller, has he gone out with a bang, or another whimper?
In his 2002 book, Dark Star Safari (not his best), Theroux travelled along the eastern side of the African continent from Cairo to Cape Town. This time he decided to even things out by travelling in the west, from South Africa to Namibia and Angola. The plan is sketchy to say the least; late on in the book, he does mention the idea of getting up into Mali and ending in Timbuktu, but by then it is clear that he will not.
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