Fresh Air Fiend by Paul Theroux

has revealed an Iran—bloodstained, ringing with the cries of vindictive clergymen—that I more easily recognize.
    Â 
    Events ought to prove the worth of the travel book. V. S. Pritchett's
The Spanish Temper,
written in 1955, is both topographical and psychological. Reading it, you are prepared for anything: the death of Franco, the reinstatement of the king, the rise of the Social Democrats, or whatever. V. S. Naipaul's analysis of Hindu caste in
An Area of Darkness,
Henri Fauconnier's anecdotal sociology of planters in
The Soul of Malaya,
the Mexican anti-clericalism recorded by Graham Greene in
The Lawless Roads,
all these say something that makes the immediate future of the particular country coherent. The books are also, incidentally, the adventures of individuals. Even
A Barbarian in Asia,
by the Belgian surrealist Henri Michaux, has topographical value, though he is a more courageous traveler and more precise observer when he is writing of imaginary countries
(Voyage to Great Garaban).
Ella Maillart's
Forbidden Journey
is exactly the same trip as Peter Fleming's in
News from Tartary,
since they were traveling companions. But the books read like different trips, as anyone who compares them will see. (Hers is clearsighted and down-to-earth; his is often facetious.) The same thing goes for Greene's
Journey Without Maps
and his cousin Barbara Greene's
Land Benighted,
two versions of one traipse through Liberia.
    Until recently, I was happy enough to regard the travel book as an unclassifiable artifact, like the distant journey. Then, in 1989, the events in Tiananmen Square unfolded, and in the aftermath I started to reassess the genre. I think that any travel book about China written in the mid-1980s ought to have prepared us for those events, maybe even prefigured them. I have always felt that the truth is prophetic, that if you describe precisely what you see and give it life with your imagination, then what you write ought to have lasting value, no matter what the mood of your prose.
    "Cantankerous" is the lazy reviewer's word for my handling of this complex process. "Mr. Theroux didn't like [the Chinese people] much," a
New York Times
reviewer observed about my China book,
Riding the Iron Rooster.
"Grouchy Traveler Back on the Rails Again," one headline ran, and another, "Theroux Grumpy in New China Travel Book." There were several more, and they are still fresh in my mind (though I must say that sales of half a million books have the effect of neutralizing even the most ill-natured and silly review). The thrust of many of these reviews was that I was a sour and impatient intruder in a socialist paradise, and that I had an irritating and impolite habit of bringing up unwelcome subjects while interrogating the Chinese with a kind of unreasonable gusto.
    In the book, I gave an account of how, during an anti-crime campaign, the Chinese government had executed ten thousand people—not, I pointed out, during the Ming Dynasty but between 1983 and 1986, when tourists were sailing down the Yangtze, skipping around the Forbidden City, and remarking on how "Westernized" the Chinese were. This enthusiasm for shooting hastily convicted criminals in the back of the neck, I went on, was supported by the bridge-playing, lovable Deng Xiaoping, an energetic hangman who clung to the Chinese belief in "killing a chicken to scare the monkeys." During a pep talk to the five-man standing committee of the Politburo, I continued, Mr. Deng summed up his attitude by saying, "As a matter of fact, execution is the one indispensable means of education."
    The victims of such instruction might be murderers, but they might also be pimps, arsonists, prostitutes, gamblers, procurers, rapists, white-collar criminals, thieves, muggers, or members of Chinese secret societies. In other words, disrupters of life. The Chinese have a horror of
luan,
chaos. A suitable candidate for capital punishment is anyone who goes against the grain. People