Great Railway Bazaar

In 1973 the novelist Paul Theroux made a decision that dramatically altered his career and changed a genre. He would travel Asia by train (from London to Japan and back), write copious notes, and, on his return home to London, write a book about the experience. Published in 1975, The Great Railway Bazaar achieved a popular and critical success rare in publishing. The book became a classic of travel writing and created a model for the genre that today remains vibrantly alive. (The very interesting back story of this seminal work is relayed by Theroux in his 2008 book Ghost Train to the Eastern Star.)

The Great Railway Bazaar is Theroux on steel wheels. He wasn't doing the gig for the travel industry. He was being his expansive, audacious self. To the benefit of audiobook listeners, Theroux fans, and literature itself, Recorded Books hired Frank Muller to narrate Bazaar. Muller's narration enhances Theroux's accomplishment and expands the book's reach, as the Shakespearean stage actor sounds as good here as he did narrating great works of fiction in his prime: there simply was no one better.

Chapter one begins: "Ever since childhood, when I lived within earshot of the Boston and Maine, I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it. Those whistles sing bewitchment: railways are irresistible bazaars." Muller, with these first sentences, displays his mastery of phrasing and timing; his subtleties of intonation; his coloring and fluent shifts of emphasis and stress. Throughout The Great Railway Bazaar he displays the incomparable quickness and assurance with which these exceptional narrative qualities develop and transform at every turn of phrase, change of scene, and development of plot. This astonishing ability is Frank Muller's modus operandi, making him one of the greatest and most popular audiobook narrators of all time.

Sadly, in November 2001, Frank Muller suffered debilitating injuries in a motorcycle accident. He died of these injuries in June 2008. —David Chasey