Books : The Big Red Train Ride

Rating: - The Big Red Train Ride
As someone who is planning to travel the Trans-Siberian Railway in the not too distant future I read with interest this book that follows Eric Newby's journey taken back in 1977.

Accompanied by his wife, a German photographer and their official guide from the then USSR authorities, it makes for interesting reading to go back into the "good old days" of the Cold War and revisit life behind the Iron Curtain.

There are many facts and figures about the railway and its construction which can become slightly laborious, far more interesting are the passages taken for other writings by other adventurers who travelled the route, either on the train or by sledge, in far earlier times.

Unfortunately Newby's style of writing can be quite workmanlike and as such you don't get any feeling for his thoughts about his fellow travellers or those he meets on the journey. Rather than write the book interspersed with witty anecdotes he labours on about the point of how the photography opportunities were restricted and mentions little else about the actual happenings on the journey. For example one photograph within the book shows the interior of a woodsman's cottage, yet we read nothing of how they came to visit this place and what the woodsman's life was like.

Finally the book's ending was particularly disappointing; basically they reach the end and then go home. No mention of if any contact was kept between him and either his German photographer friend, no mention if he final falling out with the USSR official had any further impacts, or how they actually got home from the end of nowhere.

I would possibly read any of Newby's other travel-logs only if I had a specific interest in that location.

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Rating: - Boring account of being bored
It may be that Eric Newby is an acquired taste, but I find his style of writing insufferable- his style is dull, his jokes leaden and for a famous traveller, his natural metier is the Little Englander comparing the USSR with the delights of the West Country.

This account of a 1977 trip on the Trans Siberian is a mix of a history of the railway and Newby complaining about not being allowed to photographs. When he is not repeating this complaint ad nauseum he is moaning about the restrictions imposed by his Soviet companions, complaining about the people he meets, and being rude about his wife.

Whilst I pity the friends and family of Mr Newby who had to sit through his "anecdotes" (of which there are practically none), at least they did not have to pay for the privilege. There is one singular interesting fact- which is that it was sufficient to be caught taking snuff to be exiled to Siberia in the eighteenth century, but only after your septum had been torn out.