"The Old Patagonian Express" is the name of the last train that Theroux takes as he reaches the Patagonian desert. Written in the late seventies, many of the political realities he describes are outdated, but it is still a descriptive narrative of a most unusual journey. It is a story of how to get from here to there and everything that is entailed with it. The journey, with all its hardships, is part of the travel. In the case of the maxim, it is not the destination, but the journey that counts, this is what this book is about. It stays true to its message and clear about why it was undertaken, and in this story of how to get from here to there, Paul Theroux is a master storyteller.

If this sequel- it must be called that- is not so delightful as "The Great Railway Bazaar," the fault is as much geography's as Theroux's. Europe and Asia are a richer venue for this sort of thing than Latin America, which by contrast lacks character, deep literary and historical associations, and variety. For anyone experienced with Europe, it is desperately boring. Squalor in Mexico is identical to squalor in El Salvador; the ghastly Mexican town Papaloapan is too much like the horrible Costa Rican town Limon, 600 miles farther south... In Buenos Aires Theroux is thoroughly primed to play Boswell to Borges's Johnson, and the resulting conversations constitute a delightful climax, a triumphant overflow of civility and intelligence after all the brutality and stupidity...

But except for the Borges episode, the reader gets little relief from the horrors and boredom. He misses the sheer joy of the anomalous, which surfaced frequently in "The Great Railway Bazaar." Here Theroux is exhausted. Outraged by Latin America, he picks quarrels, depicts himself winning arguments, allows his liberal moral superiority to grow strident. He seems to think we have to be told that people should not starve or live in filth. Even though he knows he's doing these things ("I was sick of lecturing people on disorder"), he can't help himself, and sometimes the unpleasant effect threatens the reader's pleasure in Theroux's sharp eye, which is capable of such shrewd perceptions: he notices that an American on the train is wearing "the sort of woolen plaid forester's shirt that graduate students in state universities especially favor"; that in Peru "the Indians have a broad-based look, like chess pieces"; that the terrain outside the train window, at one low point, looks like a "world of kitty litter"; and that in the dark, "in one field, five white cows were as luminous as laundry."