Scan barcode
A review by taylormcneil
The Amur River: Between Russia and China by Colin Thubron
adventurous
dark
informative
reflective
medium-paced
5.0
Don’t be misled by the prosaic title—this is a powerful literary voyage with one of the best travel writers of the past 50 years. At age 79, Thubron undertook to travel the entire length of the Amur River, the 10th longest in the world, from its origins in the deserted forests of Mongolia, into Russia, and then along the 1,100 mile border it creates between China and Russia.
His rusty Russian and Mandarin come back to him, and he is able to travel with a freedom others would find impossible. He spends a week on horseback, hitches rides with an Orthodox monk, hunkers down in an almost deserted abbey while Russian troops hold war games outside, ventures into far northeastern China, evading the authorities, crosses back to Russia, and finally ends at the Pacific.
But mostly what he reports on are the people he meets. These are ordinary people whose lives linger in our imagination: the blowhard Cossack who fears and hates the Chinese just a cross the river; the Chinese father whose sole child, a daughter, is living a better life far away from these northern borderlands and their frozen winters, and will never return; the bluff Russian outdoorsman who takes him to the far reaches of the Amur as it nears the Pacific, mingling with marginalized Siberian natives, poachers, and policemen in this back of beyond, the people so cynical about their fatherland that hope for the future is impossible.
It’s a sobering journey—and a glimpse into a vast part of the world mostly forgotten. Thubron’s writing is crystalline, honed to a fine finish, and always in service of telling the story of people and history and place.
His rusty Russian and Mandarin come back to him, and he is able to travel with a freedom others would find impossible. He spends a week on horseback, hitches rides with an Orthodox monk, hunkers down in an almost deserted abbey while Russian troops hold war games outside, ventures into far northeastern China, evading the authorities, crosses back to Russia, and finally ends at the Pacific.
But mostly what he reports on are the people he meets. These are ordinary people whose lives linger in our imagination: the blowhard Cossack who fears and hates the Chinese just a cross the river; the Chinese father whose sole child, a daughter, is living a better life far away from these northern borderlands and their frozen winters, and will never return; the bluff Russian outdoorsman who takes him to the far reaches of the Amur as it nears the Pacific, mingling with marginalized Siberian natives, poachers, and policemen in this back of beyond, the people so cynical about their fatherland that hope for the future is impossible.
It’s a sobering journey—and a glimpse into a vast part of the world mostly forgotten. Thubron’s writing is crystalline, honed to a fine finish, and always in service of telling the story of people and history and place.