OPEN LANDS: Travels Through Russia’s Once Forbidden Places.<i> By Mark Taplin</i> .<i> Steerforth Press: 376 pp., $29.50</i>

In one way, writing travel literature resembles its associated activity, learning a language. Achieving some fluency is encouragingly easy, but mastery is almost impossible. Transcribing the notes from a trip frees you from the necessity of invention, and your itinerary provides your structure. But the latter “advantage” is really the problem: Your book is shackled to the unholy mess of real life: its formlessness, tedium and false starts.

Fifty or 100 years ago, when most travel writing belonged to the adventure genre, the mess was part of the point. It was the sheer uncertainty of the trip that gave the narrative its suspense, and if the information was murky and incomplete, well, that mirrored the benighted lands through which the hero-narrator conducted us. A few modern writers, such as Redmond O’Hanlon, carry on that imperial tradition, but most have had to search for some other organizing principle. Many have looked for it in some packageable geographical notion, such as following the equator or rounding the shores of the Mediterranean, as though the shapeliness of the endpaper maps might osmotically transfer itself to the pages in between.

Other writers, like Colin Thubron and Jan Morris, employ a sensibility and style so distinctive that everything they cover seems to fit together (when it works) like culinary courses harmonized by seasonings. Others, like Misha Glenny and Pico Iyer, know their subjects so well that they can fit the untidy bits of what they actually see into a coherent framework. Bruce Chatwin--and no doubt others who never admitted it--achieved a formal beauty more ingeniously by making things up, as he did for significant portions of “The Songlines.”

For the rest of us--more or less honest, informed but not expert, competent stylists but without a Grand Style--writing travel literature is a matter of straddling stools and trying not to fall between them. Mark Taplin’s “Open Lands” is a first effort with sufficient intelligence and wit to promise good things, but it displays weaknesses common to the genre: It has some adventure, some social history, some contemporary reportage and some fine writing but not enough of any one of them.

Taplin set himself a task that perhaps no one could really do justice to. After several years as an American diplomat in Moscow in the 1980s, he returned in 1992 to explore some of the vast regions of Russia that had been closed to foreigners for decades but were suddenly accessible under the “Open Lands” agreement signed by Russia and the United States that year. His book describes his visits to seven places: Velikiy Ustyug, Vorkuta and Arkhangelsk in the Far North; Kabardino-Balkaria in the Caucasus; Tuva, on the border of Mongolia; and the Kamchatka Peninsula and Vladivostok in the Far East. Three hundred-plus pages can only sketch on such a broad and varied canvas.

In his shaky first chapter, Taplin travels to Velikiy Ustyug, a city some 500 miles northeast of Moscow, which he seems to have picked because it used to be the capital of a province and because velikiy is Russian for “great.” “Friends in Moscow said they had heard of Velikiy Ustyug but could not quite recall what they had been told,” he writes. The reader may finish this chapter with the same problem. Taplin meets a couple of black marketeers, takes on an alcoholic guide named Yuri and visits a museum and some churches. Nothing much happens, so Taplin provides thumbnail sketches of a few historical personages who hailed from the town and describes some architecture: “Across a frozen pond is the Church of Ascension, Velikiy Ustyug’s most beautiful. Built at the behest of a rich merchant, the church was completed in 1648. . . .” Taplin’s eye isn’t unusual enough to make inconsequential material snap into a lively or memorable focus, and one is left to wonder how this minor city’s potted history contributes to the “new set of observations” of Russia that Taplin promised in his prologue.

The next chapter on Vorkuta is stronger. Deep in the Russian North, on the slopes of the Urals, Vorkuta is a coal mining settlement that for decades was a major island in the Gulag Archipelago, and Taplin constructs his account around the harrowing memoirs of camp survivors. There is some good material here, and Taplin’s writing often rises to the occasion, as in this wrenching brief on the children of political prisoners: “They were shipped en masse to orphanages and remade according to the merciless codex of the time. They were given family names like Forgotten, Homeless, Abandoned or simply labeled in accordance with the cities and towns from which they were taken. . . . The children were to love only the Party and their country; their parents were portrayed as bloodthirsty traitors. From this frosty bosom, they went into an indifferent world to become criminals, schizophrenics, suicides.”

But such writing and choice of materials make one regret what is missing. As with the chapter on Velikiy Ustyug, there is history here but little light shed on current conditions. Travel literature often errs in this direction because it is easiest for writers to rely on books and historical records, which are incomparably more convenient sources of information than people, who speak in impenetrable dialects or never get to the point or simply don’t want to talk to you. And history, after all, is neatly organized into a story, whereas who knows what the swirl around you means or where it’s heading?

When one of the former prisoners Taplin interviews wants to talk only about the present, Taplin finds this “endearing and comic” but apparently not interesting. He seems fascinated by the prison camps he spots still operating along the rail line to Vorkuta but tells us nothing about the conditions of those camps today and the kinds of prisoners in them. In the absence of this, his sightings amount to nothing more than evidence that Russia has prisons.

He ascribes Russians’ “tearing their hair out over 10-cent loaves of bread and one-dollar bottles of vodka” to their ignorance of market forces, without connecting their attitude to his observation 50 pages later that a typical worker on state salary is making about $6 a month. If he gave more weight to Russia’s catastrophic decline in living standards, he might have tried to engage the guide at the Vorkuta museum who glorified her town’s past instead of seeing only a Stalinist caricature.

Other chapters display the same imbalance between historical review and reportage. Taplin doesn’t stay anywhere long enough to tease much from conversations or events; he’s too influenced by the picturesque, which, like a book, is something one can “read.” On a brief excursion through “an eight-hundred year old hamlet rousing itself for another summer day,” he allows his natural elation at the contemplation of a pastoral scene to spill over into claptrap: “Seventy-five turbulent years had glided by with these villages barely having caught the eye of the notoriously intrusive Communist Party. . . . Even a mere passerby could feel the ancient rhythm of these places: a song of simple means, modest horizons.” A page later, next to a pretty little church, he meets an old peasant who tells him “[t]he Reds took away the bells and all the icons. First the church died, then the village. Collectivization, they called it.” Strangely, Taplin seems not to see the contradiction between these two passages.

In his chapter on the region of Kabardino-Balkaria, Taplin’s weakness for written sources leads him to the egregious practice of interlarding his text with disembodied quotes from the Koran, for no reason that I could fathom except as a way of reminding the reader that the Balkars and Kabardinians are Muslim. This is no better than peppering an account of a trip through China with asides that begin, “Confucius says. . . .” And on the Kamchatka Peninsula, he is so taken with the quixotic idea of retracing a route described in an obscure 19th century travel account that he stumbles unawares into a rocket test facility and is accused of being a spy. The only chapter that really gives much of an idea of modern Russia is the last one, on Vladivostok, and the reason is simple: Taplin was stationed at the U.S. consulate there for a summer, so he had time to orient himself a bit.

Throughout “Open Lands” there are indications that, equipped with better material, Taplin could produce a fine book. Some of his writerly touches are compact and lovely, and he has a playful subversive wit that breaks out at surprising moments, such as this deadpan comment in the middle of a passage implicitly supportive of Western investment in Russia: “The real assets Russia had to offer, the virgin forests clamoring to be clearcut, the fishing grounds aching to be denuded, the gold and diamond mountains crying out to be leveled, were not on auction here.” And he can pen a pretty good apothegm: “The old Soviet rule of thumb that everything not explicitly permitted was prohibited could not cope with an economic system [capitalism] premised on the opposite idea.”

Like so many travel narratives, “Open Lands” is a compendium of tempting glimpses of books that could be. A volume on Vorkuta alone, for example, in which an observer of Taplin’s gifts lived in the town for several months and combined extensive history with a fuller contemporary portrait delving into the ways in which a place and its people accommodate, or suppress, such a nightmarish past would be a rich contribution to the literature on Russia. Perhaps it’s not a bad thing to leave a reader hungry for more. But it’s not a satisfying thing, either.