Colin Thubron: 'I wanted to vanish into the background'

Acclaimed as both a travel writer and a novelist, Colin Thubron makes solo voyages to the edges of the earth - and of the human mind. Jeremy Lewis explores his life's journey

Although best known as a travel writer – and one of the most highly regarded practitioners on the move today – Colin Thubron likes to alternate his adventures in Central Asia or Siberia with the writing of novels. Whereas the travel books are footloose and outward-looking, his novels explore states of mind, and are deliberately confined in their settings. A Cruel Madness is set in a mental hospital, Falling in a prison, while Distance examines the world through the eyes of someone who has lost his memory. His sixth and latest novel, To The Last City (Chatto & Windus, £14.99), is very different: it is based on a journey he made to Vilcabamba, the last refuge of the Incas against the invading Spaniards.

Latin America is off Thubron's professional beat, but he has made two trips to Peru in recent years. "I went there first with John Hemming, the historian of the Conquistadors, when the seed of the novel was sown," he says. Accompanied by a guide and four muleteers, he returned in search of what remains of Vilcabamba, ruins which can only be reached via a vertiginous landscape of gorges and mist-shrouded mountains. "It was the toughest and most physically exhausting journey I have ever made," Thubron recalls.

The novel's characters find themselves in a world in which "everything had returned to pure shape, its human purpose gone". One, a journalist, is at a loss for words when confronted by the landscape and remains of a civilisation which had flourished without the invention of writing. Thubron's writing, on the other hand, is as exact and vivid as ever: he notes in the rainforest, "trees like wrecked umbrellas", and how the mules "minced" across a swaying cable bridge.

I visited Colin Thubron in his London base off Holland Park: a cottage in the garden of a white stuccoed house, with a pleasingly overgrown garden and sunlight streaming in through French windows. Thubron is a lean, youthful-looking figure; as befits a seasoned traveller, he is sunburned and bright eyed. He has an unashamedly upper-class accent; his manner is hesitant, friendly and courteous, and he combines a strong sense of where he wants to go with the modesty of an old-fashioned English gentleman. As I arrive, a photographer is packing her kit amidst offers of help, and while Thubron hurries out to make me coffee, I nose about his bookshelves. I notice the works of the two travel writers who most influenced him, Freya Stark and Patrick Leigh Fermor.

Thubron was born in 1939, and grew up in Sussex: "I think of my early life as spent in a garden." His father was an easy-going military man, descended from Samuel Morse, inventor of the code. His mother, who is still alive and an intrepid traveller, is descended from John Dryden. The Drydens were "arty and eccentric", and Thubron may have inherited from them his obsessive temperament. Once he has decided to write about a place, he will read and think and live it to the exclusion of all else, until he has worked it out of his system. He will fill notebook after notebook in his tiny, cramped hand, so hard to interpret that a KGB man understandably assumed it to be code.

"I seem to have spent much of my childhood in a dream world," he says, but reality intruded brutally when his sister died in an accident. When he was nine, his father was posted to Ottawa as military attaché, and for three years he criss-crossed the Atlantic during school holidays. "We travelled in those old Stratocruisers, stopping off at Shannon and Gander and goodness knows where else on the way." He remembers the bright lights of New York after the drabness of post-war Britain.

"I was in love with words and poetry from early age"; at Eton, where he was "academically very average", he formed a poetry society with Grey Gowrie and Ferdinand Mount, at which they read their own works aloud. He was rejected for National Service after damaging a cartilage in his knee, and decided not to bother with university after failing to get an English scholarship to King's, Cambridge.

He joined Hutchinson as a trainee in 1959, and spent three years in publishing. He found London life claustrophobic, longed to travel, and wrote unpublishable novels in his spare time. How did he break free? "I'd been given an 8mm cine camera for my 21st birthday and I learned that the BBC was prepared to commission amateur film-makers to contribute to a series of 'Travellers' Tales'." Acting as cameraman and sound-recordist, he made two films, on Morocco and Japan, both shown on TV.

He was not yet his own master, however. Briefly convinced that he should marry and settle down, he went back into publishing, this time in New York. "While I was in New York, I could think of nothing but going to live in Damascus," which he had visited with his parents. He longed to find out what went on behind those blank, forbidding façades, to see again its magical, briefly glimpsed courtyards with their flowers and fountains. After making his way home via New Zealand, Australia and Vietnam, he spent three months in his chosen city, and began his career as a writer. Mirror to Damascus was published in 1967, followed, in quick succession, by books on Lebanon, Jerusalem and Cyprus. "Journey into Cyprus was my first mature travel book, the one in which I found my voice."

Although masterly practitioners like Leigh Fermor, Norman Lewis, Wilfred Thesiger, Eric Newby and James Morris were hard at work, this was not a good time for travel writers to make ends meet. Thubron wrote pot boilers for Time-Life's series on Great Cities. The late Seventies proved a dispiriting period, but recovering from a fractured spine – the result of a motor accident – gave him ample time to brood upon the kind of travel book he wanted to write. Each of his first four books had dealt with what seemed a smallish, self-contained subject, one that could be seen in the round by a single author within a single book. He had, in the classic manner of travel writers, interlaced his experiences with appropriate quantities of history, topography, architecture and the like.

Now, he planned to take on far larger subjects, to cast himself adrift in whole continents rather than a city or island. Given his obsessive nature, he would still find out all he needed to know about the places, but would now rely far more on his own experiences, on meetings along the way, on finding out how people's ideas and behaviour had been affected by politics and religion. "I wanted to vanish into the background like an invisible man, unnoticed by those around me yet observing everything that came my way," he says.

A poor linguist, he had never learned a word of Arabic while writing his Middle Eastern books. Now, having decided to launch himself into the daunting wastes of Brezhnev's Russia, he learned the language before setting out. Among the Russians was published in 1983; when he decided to write about China, he taught himself Chinese.

Paul Theroux's The Great Railway Bazaar in 1975 had triggered a boom in travel-writing, and Thubron was one of its beneficiaries. He still likes to travel rough on his own, but can now afford the occasional luxury when he goes with his girlfriend, an American academic who teaches at the University of Philadelphia. His next travel book will take in the Silk Road, from Xian in China through Central Asia to Antalya in Turkey. He will travel much of the time by public transport, and expects the varieties of Islam encountered en route to loom far larger than the footsteps of Marco Polo. But nothing can be certain till he gets there, with his rucksack and his sleeping bag. With his latest novel behind him, that can't be far away.

Biography

Colin Thubron was born in 1939; his father was Brigadier Gerald Thubron DSO. He went to school at Eton, worked in publishing for Hutchinson and Macmillan, and in the early Sixties made freelance television films in Turkey, Japan and Morocco. He has been a full-time travel writer and novelist since 1967, when Mirror to Damascus appeared. His other travel books include Among the Russians (1983), Behind the Wall (1987), which won the Thomas Cook and Hawthornden prizes, The Lost Heart of Asia (1994) and In Siberia (1999). His fiction began with The God in the Mountain (1977) and continued with Emperor (1978), A Cruel Madness (1984), which won the Silver Pen award, Falling (1989), Turning Back the Sun (1991) and Distance (1996). His new novel, To the Last City, is published this week by Chatto & Windus. In 2000 he was awarded the Mungo Park Medal, and the Lawrence of Arabia Memorial Medal in 2001. When not travelling, Colin Thubron lives in Holland Park, west London.