To a Mountain in Tibet by Colin Thubron – review

Sara Wheeler applauds Colin Thubron's elegiac pilgrimage to Tibet
in The Guardian, Saturday 5 February 2011

"Where are you?" asks Colin Thubron in his 10th travel book, as he gulps thin Tibetan air. In the other nine volumes, the inner journey hovers between the lines as our man bushwhacks through the lost heart of Asia, bounces along the silk road in the back of a superannuated Moskvich and gnaws gristle behind the Great Wall. Now, in Thubron's eighth decade, the inner action moves to the lines themselves. Where Are You? would have made a better title for this desperately engaging book. The author is addressing his dead mother.

To a Mountain inTibet  tells the simple story of a secular pilgrimage to the sacred slopes of Kailas in the western Himalaya. Travelling on foot with a cook, a guide and a horse man, Thubron sets out from Humla, the remotest of the Nepalese regions. Steering at first by the Karnali river, the group soon swings north-west towards the Nala Kankar Himal that shelves into Tibet, walking under walnut and apricot trees, through silent Thakuri villages and paddy fields, where traders once bartered salt and wool for lowland grains. Thubron conjures the wobble of a tin bridge over a torrent, the "cathedral shadow" of spruce and prickly oak and the two-note song of a Himalayan cuckoo over smooth grasslands. Sometimes the four seek refuge on the mud floor of a home, at other times they pitch tents, greeting, round the camp fire, stocky smugglers in bobble hats driving buffalo freighted with Chinese cigarettes.

Monasteries have always been a Thubronian leitmotif – remember the monk in Journey into Cyprus (1974) who watched the young author shaving and asked if he could pick up the World Service on his razor? A great number punctuate this latest journey, furnishing the creaking prayer wheels and fluttering flags indigenous to Tibetan narratives. The country has long held the west in thrall, the very image of an inaccessible otherworld, an exalted sanctuary and a realm of ancient learning. Thubron admits he has absorbed the romance. As an antidote, he tries to unravel the complex beginnings of the mystique and expose the reality of internal Tibetan violence centuries before 1959 and the hateful Chinese invasion. Through the direct speech of interlocutory monks, he is able to explore the shifting pantheon of regional deities – Hindu, Buddhist and shadowy, shamanic figures who waft through the hinterland.

Restraint has always been a hallmark of Thubron's style, in the travel books at least (he also writes novels). He husbands his lyrical expression artfully. It leapt forth unexpectedly, to great effect, in the memorable first line of In Siberia (1999): "The ice-fields are crossed for ever by a man in chains." Now, in this slim book, Thubron allows his emotional range to expand. This journey, he reveals in the opening pages, is a form of mourning for his mother, who has recently died – the last of his living family.

Full review at The Guardian.