By Ken Haley

A decade ago, when the author traversed Central  Asia in the dusty footsteps of warlords, Silk Road merchants and assorted other  adventure travelers, the Soviet Empire was crashing around his ears.

 For most Americans, though, I think it fair to say, events in Tajikistan or Caspian Sea oil futures circa 1990 failed to  register the tiniest of blips on their mental radar.

  Since September 11, the attitude of Uzbeks to topics such as jihad and the religious and ethnic fault lines fissuring Afghan society has metamorphosed from an arcane academic
speciality into one more matter on which U.S. national security may ultimately hinge.

  For both the national-security specialist and  the general reader who relishes history brought alive, "The Lost Heart of Asia" remains as insightful as it was on publication day, with
the extra enticement of indispensability.

  Those uninitiated into Thubron' florid personalized writing style, be warned: each chapter is so rich in text and subtext, so multilayered, that 'Lost Heart' is a book best sampled and put aside for a while; you devour it at the risk of cerebral indigestion.

   A second caution is in order, for those who on reading the chapter headings - 'The Siege of Merv' and 'Steppelands', to name but two - mistake the genre for pure travelogue.
Paul Theroux may meet and discard characters met en route; Thubron is as likely to spend a week with them, indulge in vodka-drinking feasts until dawn, and get under their skin (which is why his best passages seem to combine reportorial veracity with a novelist's
plausibility).

  As 70 years of Soviet rule withered on the vine, Thubron found only glimmerings of nostalgia, yet few of his interlocutors bother to disguise their contempt for the Russians' replacement with an Iranian-style Islamic orthodoxy.

   On almost every page, the unpredictability and individuality of human behavior arises in all its glory, like the morning sun penetrating the fog of collective stereotypes surrounding the peopleswho inhabit these lands as far from the United States as it is possible to be - both physically and, dare I say it, imaginatively.

   Are these peoples, like us, loyal to a nation state? Or does theirunderstand of what their faith requires override all other allegiances?

   At one point, Thubron shares a hotel room in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, with Oman, his traveling companion through much of the region. The external world (Tajikistan was on the brink of a
five-year civil war) is never ignored but constantly kept subordinate to the internal.

   He writes: "On one of those distracted evenings, when the crash of small-arms fire kept us up late, the question of national identity nagged at me again, and I asked him if he were proud of being Uzbek ...He looked a little bewildered. 'Yes, I suppose I  am proud ... but I'm proud of being Muslim too.'

   "Yet I knew he was not a believer. Rather he felt part of the  umma,  of the wider family of
Muslim peoples: a generous but vague identity ... His true nation was his extended family ...

   "I can trace my family over 200 years," he  said.  "It used to be common among us, but it's dying out now. So I'm  teaching my youngest son the same ... I don't want to be forgotten
after I'm dead."

    "I said exactingly: 'Is it so important? A name?' I was wondering what it really meant: the transient survival of some syllables in the collective memory.

    "But he did not understand this. "I want to be honored,"  he said. "I want my place back.' "

     To rephrase the question: devout  nationalist, or devout, period?

     The answer, you see - and it really is as if Thubron opens your eyes and you see it for the first time, with crystal clarity - is as complex as every one of us.

     This eye-opening goes on for nearly 400 absorbing pages. "The Lost Heart of Asia" isn't just a book: it's a public service. Avail yourself of it if you can.

   Ken Haley, formerly an online editor for Tokyo's Asahi Evening  News, is currently traveling through Central Asia and the Middle East, contributing occasional articles for newspapers in Australia and Asia.