Paul Theroux's China is not a pretty country. Of all the regions he visited on the trip that resulted in this book [Riding the Iron Rooster], only Tibet rates high. With rare enthusiasm he praises Lhasa, its capital, as “the one place in China I eagerly entered, enjoyed being in, and was reluctant to leave.” When he finally did so, he uttered a prayer: “Please let me come back.”

It was the clear air and scenic beauty of the Himalayas that Theroux fell in love with while in Tibet. The journey there was another matter. In a spirit of adventure, he opted to reach Lhasa by land instead of by air. That entailed first a 30-hour ride to Golmud, a town in the Qinghai desert, in a “dirty, scruffy, extremely crowded” train, with no hot water, food or lights; and then a 1,000-mile drive over rugged, deserted terrain in a damaged car with an inept, Beethoven-loving driver and his whining girl friend. During the three days required for the second leg of the trip, the author endured inedible food, filthy lodgings, a head injury caused by an auto mishap, and a nagging fear that he might be abandoned at the edge of the Tibetan Plateau.

Theroux's kind of travel is clearly not an average tourist's cup of tea. Yet almost as remarkable as the experiences he relates is the Chinese government's tolerance in allowing a foreign writer to roam about remote areas in total freedom, without an official escort. It evidently helped that he had guanxi (connections) in high places. Before he set out on his outlandish journey, he had been wined and dined in Beijing by Bette Bao Lord, fellow author (her novel Spring Moon was being made into a movie in China at the time) and wife of the American Ambassador. At the embassy dinner he was introduced to Chinese dignitaries (“all Party members”), including several English-speaking writers and scholars.

Theroux, author of the 1975 bestseller The Great Railroad Bazaar, loves to travel by rail. To avoid arriving in China with jet lag he had happily joined a tour originating in London that consisted of some 20 English, American, French, German, and Australian vacationers. They made their way by rail to Beijing via Warsaw, Moscow, Siberia, and Mongolia.

Although Theroux is obviously fascinated by strange places, he seems averse to people of all kinds. His fellow travelers are variously depicted as bullying, ugly, aloof, pompous, ignorant, and arrogant. After he parted company with the tour, he quickly acquired a distaste for the Chinese he encountered, with the possible exception of some of the writers he met at Mrs. Lord's.

Throughout the book Theroux describes the Chinese as almost universally unclean, evasive, insensitive, and bad-mannered. The detail verges on novelistic: “Everyone hawked, everyone spat, sometimes dribbling, sometimes in a trajectory that ran like candle-wax down the side of a spittoon. … They walked scuffingly, sort of skating, with their arms flapping … or else hustling puppetlike. … And they talked very loudly in that deaf, nagging and interrupting way. … Was there a national deafness?” In close quarters on trains Theroux found the behavior of the Chinese particularly disagreeable: “They were energetic litterers, and they were hellish in toilets. …”

Yet such horrors did not spoil his fondness for rail travel. He spent months riding the “Iron Rooster” line and others all over the vast land. Whatever train he found himself on, he persisted in going to the end of its run. His willingness to endure every conceivable annoyance for the sake of collecting materials for his book appears to the reader almost masochistic.

Theroux's decision to revisit China—he had been there before in 1980—was made at the urging of his brother, who said it “had become a different place.” (This brother, a lawyer, presumably knew what he was talking about, having “traveled to China 109 times since 1972.”) The China Theroux had seen earlier had struck him as “bleak and exhausted.” What he took in on this trip, six years later, did not change that impression.

Agree with him or not, you cannot accuse Theroux of basing his judgment on inadequate observation. He reached Urumchi in the northwest and Lanxiang in the northeast, both close to the Soviet border. He made it to Kunming in southwesternmost China and Xiamen (Amoy) on the southeastern coast.

On the way from one extremity to another, he stopped at the inner Mongolian city of Hohhot, but failed to meet a single Mongol. He gazed on terra-cotta warriors in Xian and admired ice sculptures in Harbin. He made a detour in an empty train to Shaoshan, where Mao Zedong's childhood home once received 8,000 pilgrims daily.

Besides Lhasa, only a few places had distinct flavors for Theroux. Turfan, the Uigher town in Xinjiang Province (“the least Chinese place I had seen”), reminded him of a Mediterranean village. Qingdao impressed him with its German architectural influence and its bright and tidy beaches. And he “found it almost impossible to find fault with” Xiamen: “Because it is in the south, the fruit is wonderful and cheap … fish and seafood are plentiful and various.”

As a roaming author looking for specifics to fill up his book scheme, Theroux's knowledge of the Chinese language served him well. In the course of his journey he had ample opportunity to converse with locals, many of whom were eager to tell him about the horrors of the Cultural Revolution. Others were more keen on trading their yuan for precious dollars; almost everywhere he went, men and women approached him wanting to “shansh marnie.” The lack of inhibition displayed by the Chinese in both cases certainly indicates a relaxation of the Communist Party's grip on the people.

The reader is not encouraged, however, to believe that China is on the track to becoming a modern industrialized nation. An American who was sent by Kodak to supervise the installation of a coasting machine informed Theroux that the young Chinese he worked with were “the worst, the laziest, the slowest, the most arrogant.” This jibes with the writer's own perception of a generation that lost its youth in Mao's “10 years of turmoil.”

While some of Theroux's generalizations concerning the Chinese contain a modicum of truth, others are downright fatuous. On seeing the biggest statue of Buddha in the world in Leshan, a city in Sichuan Province, he is moved to reflect on it as “an example of the Chinese fascination with freakishness—the very big, the very weird, the highly unusual.” From his dealings with bureaucrats he concludes that they invariably answer questions with a nervous laugh, which seems to him “sinister.” When he reads in a newspaper of a little girl's severed arm being successfully reattached by Chinese physicians, he is reminded that China is “a society of patches.” No doubt, he writes, “it was this make-do-and-mend philosophy that had inspired these medical advances and miracles with amputees.”

Theroux almost never found himself unexpectedly cheered during his wanderings in China. A blessed exception was when he discovered a Chinese version of Orwell's 1984 in a Xiamen library—after the translator, whom he had met at the embassy dinner, had told him the book was restricted reading.

Overall, China's color is dull, as Theroux captures it, its smells are mostly foul, and its sound is noisy. Riding the Iron Rooster may be absorbing to read, but it is bound to discourage the potential traveler to China. And that is too bad.