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In SiberiaEditions
ReviewConsidering Thubron’s remarkable sequence of earlier books on Russia, China and Central Asia, perhaps his next subject was inevitable. One wonders whether he welcomed it, or approached it with a sense of grim Russian fatalism: for there is a feeling of mounting doom through the book. He has done a vast amount of research in advance which he apparently retains, so that he can recall in every God-forsaken hole what casual massacre occured there, what he ought to look for and ask. Yet for all his learning, Thubron characteristically travels light: his mind is open, and he talks to people everywhere, be they tramps beside the site of the building in Ekaterinburg where Tsar Nicholas and his family were murdered, or the doctor in a tiny, desperate fishing village far down the Yenisei. The journey underlying this book is extraordinary, when you think about it - the distance covered, the adaptability and stamina that were needed, quite apart from the knowledge - but Thubron is not the kind of travel writer to dwell on his own difficulties. He is describing Siberia, not himself, and what emerges is a brilliant portrait of a vast, diverse and naturally wealthy territory, united only in a history of calamitous expoloitation and a future of lonely, squalid catastrophes. - review by Johnny de Falbe |
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