Is this the last of Theroux’s travel books? If it is, he has created an impressive cannon, and this is a fitting finale. In this book he joins the many writers who have travelled through Mexico, but his story is a refreshing one as many others have covered the violence of the cartels or the horrors faced by migrants travelling to the US border, while Theroux finds new angles from which to view a huge, complex country which has a capital city with (as he points out) a population far larger than that of any of the Central American countries to its south.

He doesn’t ignore either the cartels or the migrants, but he does find a new way of writing about them. He travels along the whole border, staying in border towns and making frequent crossings from one side to the other. Sometimes this involves long queues, but at other times it’s the inconsequential crossing of a small bridge over a river and after passing through a gate, perhaps with few formalities. His comparisons of the twin cities that the border separates bring the differences to life.

Then he travels through the rest of Mexico, pointing out that the country changes markedly only 20 miles from the border. He finds small villages with huge churches, often built on the tops of demolished temples to “heathen” gods, he explores Mexico City, teaches a group of stimulating students and later improves his Spanish in classes in Oaxaca. He gets stopped by threatening police officers whom he’s forced to bribe, but he also finds narrow, stoney rural roads through countryside where there is staggering poverty and half the population has emigrated northwards.

In one such village he describes a scene of everyday life in which “each person is animated in a task” and likens this to a Mexican clock made of spare parts, “its workings tapping the time, gulping the seconds.” He observes that “travel is less about landscapes than about people – not power brokers but pedestrians, in the long march of everyman.” He says that he feels lucky in the people he met.

He makes an observation which accords with my own experience. After meeting Subcomandante Marcos, the Zapatista leader in Chiapas, he notes Marcos’s views on the paternalism of foreign aid. Theroux then comments: “…foreign aid as it is conventionally practised is essentially a failure, futile in relieving poverty, and often harmful, relieving the ills of a few at the expense of the many.” I have seen such failure myself in Nicaragua, with poorly designed and often costly projects that gave great volunteer opportunities to visiting Europeans but did little for the poor communities they were intended to benefit.

Although Theroux is a traveller, he largely avoids tourists, as he managed to do in all his other travel writings. This, of course, makes it more likely that he will capture some vital essence of the places through which he travels. If he has stopped travelling and, more importantly, writing accounts of his journeys, we will miss him.