The Pillars of Hercules: A Grand Tour of the Mediterranean by Paul TherouxREVIEW BY JEZZAThe subtitle of the book is “A Grand Tour of the Mediterranean”, and in a way this is a modern-day equivalent of the famed Grand Tours taken by European aristocracy in the last century. Paul Theroux travels the length and breadth of this sea that has done so much to shape the consciousness of the world, and like the nobility of old, he takes in all the sights while remaining perpetually detached from them. The countries that were the cradle of European civilization retain their spectacular ruins and exquisite architecture, but today the sites are overrun by hordes of tourists; the picturesque fishing villages overlooking wonderful beaches just a few years ago are now concrete jungles where anonymous hotels and greasy cafés line the seafront. It is this juxtaposition of old and new, of where the modern world rubs up against the ancient one, that so fascinates him, and it is a fascination with an unsparing gaze. On the Rock of Gibraltar while the tourists watch the Barbary apes for which the Rock is famed, he is watching the tourists, casting a baleful eye over them as they shriek and point, slap their children and drop litter, musing that the apes are not only better behaved than their human counterparts, but also that they have more dignity.
Beginning his journey in Spain, the country where mass tourism was invented, he makes his way eastwards through France and Italy, heading for the Levant. By travelling in the winter he hopes to avoid the crowds, but remove thousands of tourists from a landscape designed with them in mind and you see the hidden underbelly of a place; everywhere there is the melancholy of an out-of-season resort. Theroux describes, with characteristic acidity,”The utterly blighted landscape…Europe’s vacationland, a vile, straggling sandbox.” He doesn’t seek out scenic places, but rather those that will give the true sense of how it feels to live there; thus, on hearing two Americans exchange horror stories of muggings and gangs in Marseilles, he vows to go there at once, discovering a cheerfully tough, working-class port which despite the gulf between the French and the large Arab population, has the feel of a genuine Mediterranean melting-pot – a cultural bouillabaisse.
From Marseilles he heads to Corsica and Sardinia, then across the Tyrrhenian Sea to Sicily. He thaws a little in the exuberant warmth of Italy, which offers a chance to relax before the next leg of his journey, travelling into war-torn Croatia and Bosnia – the book was written in 1994, at a time when Sarajevo was under siege and the Balkans were in flames. He conveys the futility, the shabbiness and the mayhem of the war, staying in a hotel full of refugees whose children play with a manic, aggressive energy while the dazed adults slowly try to adjust to normality again, bewildered at the events they have been caught up in. Returning briefly to Italy he catches a ferry across to Albania, and even after the former Yugoslavia he is shocked at what he sees. The entire country has been vandalized; it is in a state of anarchy after emerging from years of isolation. Nevertheless he encounters acts of great kindness from some of the people he meets – a man gives him a 50 lek note – a fortune in Albania – when he has no change, and a young couple he meets on a bus invite him home for tea. In the towns everything has been destroyed, but heading south along the coast he passes through stunning landscapes, with barren headlands overlooking deserted beaches and the glimmering sea always in the background – scenes little changed since this coastline was called Illyria and Ulysses gazed upon it as he sailed home to Ithaca.
After Albania he books a place on a cruise ship full of elderly Americans who are ‘doing the Med’. He has a wonderful eye for eccentricities, and on the Seabourne Spirit he is spoilt for choice, immortalising them mercilessly in print, but before long he tires of it, and boards a Turkish ferry through the Levant heading for Alexandria. The city was the setting for one of the 20th century’s greatest novels, “The Alexandria Quartet” by Lawrence Durrell, and Theroux pays homage to Durrell’s prose, visiting the railway station to compare it to the description of the book: “the noise of wheels cracking the slime slithering pavements. Yellow pools of phosphorous light, and corridors of darkness like tears in the dull brick façade of a stage set. Policemen in the shadows…the long pull of the train into the silver light…the giant sniffing of the engine blots out all sound…a final lurch and the train pours away down a tunnel, as if turned to liquid.” In Alexandria he meets Naguib Mahfouz, Egypt’s best-known author, who at the age of 83 had just survived an assassination attempt by an Islamic fundamentalist who stabbed him in the neck. In Mahfouz he finds a guide to Alexandria as it is today, “a broken old hag that had once been a great beauty; she was not dead, but fallen.” An ancient city founded by Alexander the Great, washed by a sea that has seen civilizations come and go, and still the city remains, ransacked by history, its carcass endlessly picked over by writers.
The book is a mosaic of places and impressions. He meets numerous characters, from irascible Israeli taxi drivers to lascivious Turkish Generals, pokes fun at most of them, is intrigued by many and inspired by a few. He is caustic, curmudgeonly, scathing and dismissive in turn, probably more so than in any other of his books, and yet he remains interested in the people and the places he visits, which is more than can be said for many of the tourists he is so keen to dissociate himself from. The Pillars of Hercules is at heart a voyage of discovery, and one where he discovers a side to the Mediterranean – one of the most visited regions on earth – which few tourists to the area will ever see.
