Andrew Eames, The 8:55 to Baghdad (The Overlook Press, 2005)
In the last few months, I've gotten hooked on travel books, especially travel books set in the Middle East. So how could I pass up a book called The 8:55 to Baghdad? I ran across a listing for it in one of the many catalogs that arrives in our mailroom. We asked the publisher for a review copy, and received an uncorrected proof in reply. That is the version on which I am basing this review.
In fairness, I should say that The 8:55 to Baghdad is more than a travel book. It's also a literary biography, subtitled 'From London to Iraq on the Trail of Agatha Christie'. It seems that the famous mystery writer took a solo trip on the Orient Express back in 1928, right after she and her first husband ended their not-so-successful marriage. Although the Orient Express only went as far as Istanbul, her travels took her all the way to Baghdad. This trip and later journeys around the region with her second husband, archaeologist Max Mallowan, provided Christie with interesting and exotic settings for several novels in addition to her well-known Murder on the Orient Express. At various points throughout the book Eames writes about Christie's childhood and young adulthood, her early efforts at making a living writing and her eventual successes at this, her marriage to Archie Christie and the birth of her only daughter Rosalind.
British travel journalist Andrew Eames got the idea to retrace Christie's journey and write this book as a consequence of a conversation with an Armenian hotelier in Aleppo and a chance rediscovery of a copy of Murder on the Orient Express in a box of old books at his home. What I couldn't tell at all from the book is how he managed to translate that idea into a project that consumed several weeks of time as well as the cost of his travel and accommodations -- and kept him on the road, away from his home and family, for that entire time. But then, unlike some other travel writers, Eames didn't spend much time talking about himself or his circumstances.
In addition to literary biography, The 8:55 to Baghdad includes quite a bit of history. Much of the historical aspect of the narrative dwells on the Orient Express itself, telling about the establishment of the railway line in the 1880s, the people who traveled the line in its heyday, and the re-routings necessitated by various wars. Alas, the Orient Express ceased operations in the 1970s, a victim of the changing preferences of long-distance travelers and of the delays encountered when the trains crossed into the nations of the former Soviet Bloc. So Eames's trip was really only an approximation of Christie's earlier one. Sometimes he rode in elegant train cars salvaged from the original Orient Express and stayed in the same hotels where she stayed. Just as often he made compromises, some due to circumstance, some to whim, as far as I could tell. For example, in Ruse, Bulgaria, he visited a very run-down railway museum and admired some shabby, but still ornamental, nineteenth-century passenger cars, but the train he took from Ruse to Varna, on the Black Sea, was VERY utilitarian, with a Slovakian Skoda engine doing the work. In Varna, he spent a few days at a low-end hotel in a working class resort area called Golden Sands where he hung out with a couple of hungry real estate agents. He took a side trip into the country with them to look at some property they were trying to market to British expatriates.
In The 8:55 to Baghdad, Eames also describes the places through which the train runs and some of the events that occurred in those places during relatively recent times. For example, he provides a detailed, concise description of the region between Trieste and Ljubljana that is pockmarked with caves that were used by soldiers and bandits during two major wars and countless minor skirmishes. While he is staying in Zagreb (Croatia), he reflects at length about the city as it looks to him and as it might have looked during Christie's time, when the Hotel Esplanade, built next to the train station, was a center of social life for the elites of Europe. During World War II, the Esplanade apparently became a favorite hangout for the Fascists. The hotel has been trying to find a new image since the Orient Express ceased operations and left it without a steady stream of clients.
Travel books are largely about space and time. Eames does a reasonably good job of accounting for his physical moves. A map at the front of the book helps with that. His numerous side trips are a bit of a challenge to follow, however. He is also not very good with the time component. I admit I am a bit spoiled. The last travel book I read was Robert Byron's The Road to Oxiana, written in the 1930s. Byron's journal entries all start with dates, locations and elevations above sea level. Of course, given the amount of backtracking that Byron does, that information is fundamental. Nonetheless, I found myself wondering how long different parts of Eames's journey were taking and felt like I needed to write up a schedule in the margins just to keep track of him. Of course the margins in this uncorrected proof aren't exactly wide enough to make that feasible.
I feel compelled to warn you that Eames makes some of the most appalling analogies I have ever encountered in anyone's writing. Just a few pages in, he compares the owner of the hotel in Aleppo to Homer Simpson, which is effective in conjuring up an image, but feels really out of place in the context of the book. I marked another of the more egregious examples later in the narrative, in which he compares a train moving through hilly country to a ball-bearing in a pinball machine. Back in the day when you could find pinball machines in coffee shops and lunchrooms, I had a close friend who played pinball regularly, so I can easily remember the look and sound of it. Somehow that just doesn't work for me as an analogy.
Alas, Eames doesn't come across as a very competent world traveler. When he is getting ready to enter Iraq (in 2002, when United Nations inspectors are still looking for Weapons of Mass Destruction) on a tour bus with a very motley group of companions, he confesses that his greatest fear is spending the next two weeks without any alcohol to drink. Obviously the subsequent deprivation has a profound effect on his cognitive abilities. When he arrives in Baghdad, he says he wants to 'scratch it and sniff the history' (291). Oh, dear. He reports that he has seen ninety-four newlywed couples registering for rooms at his hotel -- and the brides are all wearing full-skirted white wedding gowns. That wouldn't even make sense in a Western city, let alone in Baghdad. On the way from Mosul to Ur, he gazes out the bus window at the arid land and considers it remarkable that any civilization would have started in such an inhospitable place. Of course at the time it was the home of the Babylonians, the land wasn't nearly so worn out and the climate was probably much less hostile than it is today.
