SOURCE: Bien, Gloria. Review of Behind the Wall, by Colin Thubron. America 160, no. 12 (1 April 1989): 300.

In the following excerpt, Bien offers a positive assessment of Behind the Wall, praising its humor and poetic prose.

Colin Thubron's Behind the Wall presents a personal meeting of China and the West through his own experience. Born in London, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, author of two novels and several travel books, Thubron learned Mandarin before beginning his solitary journey through China. Carrying only a rucksack and traveling by train, bus and plane, in autumn and early winter 1985, he encountered and conversed with a great variety of people. Their confidences are often remarkably similar to those found in the works already discussed, though Thubron acknowledges himself to be a “foreign devil,” “obscenely tall” (six-feet tall), with an “anteater nose.” After months of sleeping on trains, in fields and in rat-infested...