Like his one-time friend and fellow traveller and writer V.S. Naipaul, Paul Theroux is a master storyteller. A travel writer, novelist and keen observer of the human condition and human nature he has fascinating insights into national characters, history, heritage and human folly. To read him is to educate yourself. He very often presents as cantankerous and critical, but he can also be very humanly sentimental. His disgust for the most basic of wretched human characteristics can be overridden by witnessing acts of human decency.

Above all, he's a fascinating chronicler, his casual conclusions interwound with a deep heterogeneous filing cabinet stuffed away in his memory like a kaleidoscope of human traits, historical events, tidbits of political, scientific, artistic anomalies that he interposes making for addictive reading. His observations of minute details barely noticeable by most people reveal a deep conviction within this man that nothing should be overlooked, that everything has meaning, and no experience is complete without draining it completely of its significance or lack thereof to form an impression.

"There was once a mosque where this cathedral stands. The mosque had itself displaced a Christian church. That early church had been built on the ruins of a Roman temple to Diana. These layers of history, like sedimentary rock, are less typical of Spanish history than of the historical multiplicity of the Mediterranean coast. Very similar layers existed on the coasts of Italy and Albania and Egypt, and elsewhere. Nine cultures on t he same spot.
"The city center of Valencia was mobbed with beggars jostling for the best begging spots. Beggars tended to congregate around the churches (as they do around mosques in Muslim countries). They were not all old women selling prayer cards, or the lame or the blind. There were some pale youths and harridans, bearded junkies in black leather, all haranguing passersby or church goers. Some others held elaborate signs, I am the father of three young children and I have no job."

Theroux was on a one-year, unscheduled, spontaneity-driven, curiosity trip across the Mediterranean, recounted in his 1995 book The Pillars of Hercules, A Grand Tour of the Mediterranean. He meant to visit as many towns, villages and cities as he could on this odyssey of discovery to places he had never before seen, only heard about, read avidly about, and wanted to experience for himself. He was travelling while the civilization breakdown in Serbia, Bosnia and Montenegro, Croatia, Kosovo was taking place. There, nothing but degraded misery had captured the landscape and the people within.

What he found was a common link between that condition there and in other countries of the Mediterranean was a fascination with pornography. Porno magazines and broadsheets available anywhere and everywhere, in the most innocuous of places, right next to children's books, toys, candy.

"In the primmest little districts in Alicante or Murcia or Mallorca, such films were on view next to the candy store or the hairdresser. And the candy stores themselves sometimes sold porno -- not just tit and bum magazines, but hard-core porn. Here is Granny behind the counter selling Juan a lottery ticket and on the magazine rack with the kiddies books and the evening papers and How to Knit, is S & M Monthly, with page after page of women being tortured, burned, tied up, sexually mutilated, spiky objects being forced into their vaginas, their arms being twisted, their screams recorded: Help! Socorro!
"Porno comic books seemed to me the worst of all, because the sexual torture was idealized and easily accessible, in a realm of unreality and fantasy that seemed dangerous. I presumed that photographs would be off-putting and disgusting -- and such photographs hardly existed, showing torture and death. But anything was possible in the comics, anything could be pictured, and usually was, including bestiality and necrophilia. 'If you are not going to buy that magazine, please put it down, senor'."

Theroux was fixated on getting to Albania, though Italians warned him he would not see anything worthwhile there. He, however, was intent on seeing for himself what it was like there. He did arrive in Split, though his passage was difficult to arrange, for he travelled only by bus or train or in small boats deliberately, eschewing air travel in favour of travelling the way ordinary people would, hoping to be able to engage in casual, enlightening conversation with as many people as he could, using his rudimentary, but useful French, Italian, German and, of course, English, since he is American. He characterized his own country as one whose culture filtered throughout the world, a culture of violence and infantalization, as exemplified by Hollywood action films and Disney.

"The point about atrocity stories, especially here, was that everyone told them. For a week I had been listening to stories about chetnik fanaticism; but, killing time in Split until the day the Ancona ferry left, I met an aid worker from Canada who told me about the Croatian fanaticism. 'There were groups of Ustasha soldiers in the bars here in Split, all singing Nazi songs -- the 'Horst Wessel' and all of that'.'
"The Ustasha were Croatian commandos, much like the Serbian chetniks. They modeled themselves on the Nazi SS and wore black shirts and a 'U' insignia. Their ruthlessness and racism dated to the fascist Ustasha regime which had governed Croatia with Nazi help during the Second World War and off its own bat, without Nazi control, had operated its own death camp. Serbian 'ethnic cleansing' was now well enough known to be universally condemned, but this policy of Croatian 'purification' was new to me."

I can recall myself as a child, during the Second World War living with my immigrant parents in Toronto, hearing them speak in hushed tones about 'chetniks' and their threat to Europe's Jews during the Nazi-mandated extermination of Jewry, a fate my mother and father, refugees from the Pale of Settlement and a small Polish shtaitel respectively, escaping Russian and Polish pogroms, who had made their way to Canada a decade earlier.