In Siberia

Colin Thubron has done a remarkable job of making a huge area of the world almost intimate, a place so desolate and intimidating seem almost welcoming. That's a tough job--Siberia is one royal mess. Yet all along Thubron's route, he meets the warmest people who could melt even the permafrost around them. His style is engaging and telling, and the mental pictures he creates of a land few people will ever see linger long after the book has been put in a prominent spot in your library. He makes this sad, rotting land almost seem like it would be the next hot travel destination--perhaps exactly what it needs to save it from extinction.

Thubron travels by train through a Siberian winter night, gets off alone at some Godforsaken stop, is not met, guesses the way to the nearest semi-deslolate village, trudges through sleet and snowdrifts until he reaches his destination - then looks for a place to stay the night in a village with no lights.... The next day when Thubron finds the long deserted and flooded Gulag mineshaft that is his objective - he doesn't just look at it, he climbs down and into it..... as far as he can go... This is a magnificent work and one that will live beyond him.

A very sweeping read about the mass of land little explored in the Western press. Language very rich though taxing. The writer is clearly an ex British private school boy, who still sees this part of the world through the unsympathetic prism of the old Cold War enemy.

'In Siberia' is about the author's trek from the Ural Mountains to Magadan in northeastern Siberia, using train, bus, truck, boat, and air. Colin Thubron is not the most engaging of travel writers. He isn't witty, he reveals little of himself, and he isn't good at building his travel narratives around a theme or 'hook.' Thubron's approach is more like that of a journalist - to document what happens to him, what he sees, and the people he encounters.

The low spots of the book are due to Thubron's habit of getting bogged down in pointless, over-long interviews. In one instance he spends too much space on a crank-physicist who claims that 'magnetic waves' can cure any disease, and later, on a fringe-archeologist who claims the first humans evolved in Siberia. A couple of pages on these eccentrics might be amusing, but Thubron doesn't know when to move on. Still, the book is of value because it documents an intriguing region at a turning point in history. He describes communities far away from roads and rail lines and, thanks to his fluent Russian, he interviews people there and describes how they see the world. Perhaps most important are his descriptions of the abandoned prison camps, some of which have never been viewed by westerners, and which are scheduled to be bulldozed. His accounts of what the Soviet government did in these camps will stick with the reader long after the book is finished.

Colin Thubron's book could hardly fail to be interesting given its subject matter. Thubron travelled the Trans-Siberian railway and made other detours through Russia's "Wild Wild East." What he found mostly was a people who are perservering despite living in an immense scarcely populated land that seems cursed by history and memories of the gulags. Some of Thubron's images are riveting and tragic. But unfortunately, his prose leaves a lot to be desired. He often writes in an off-putting second person, and he sometimes lingers on subjects that are just not that interesting. He also provides little context for his journey. He makes little mention of what compelled him to go to Siberia at this particular time, nor does he give any buildup for his travels or reflect on what it means to him. Worse yet, at the end of the book you get no sense of a journey completed. Instead, Thubron simply stopped writing.

Overall, this book was a great disappointment. I would recommend searching out Benson Bobrick's superior history of Siberia, "East of the Sun" instead.