For nearly 50 years Pico Iyer has roamed the world capturing the spirit of far-flung places, observing societies and sharing his impressions and reflections in 15 books. Born in Oxford to Indian parents, Iyer was educated and raised in England and the US. His life has been filled with cultural travel from North Korea to Easter Island, and from Iran — a country that dazzled him since boyhood — to India and Australia.
Iyer lost his heart to Japan 40 years ago, giving up a glamorous life and job in New York and moving to a single room on the backstreets of Kyoto. The travels in his new collection are signalled as a book for our troubled times. But they also form a recipe for a congenial meditation on the nature of paradise, its competing visions and complications.
At school Iyer read Paradise Lost. He later discovered that many places come with a paradise label attached: North Korea was a “People’s Paradise”, where he was terrified because locals knew so little of the outside world. In Koyasan, which he describes as a vespers’ place, he decides that paradise is regained by finding the wonder within the moment.
An early section of the book finds him in Belfast. The Shankill and Falls were ‘the cursed names we grew up with, and on to which we projected our most lurid fears’
A special longing for the Himalayas is evident where Iyer discovers “a freshness and a sense of undistractedness”. Kashmir is a paradise on the water which he sees in the gondola-like shikara boats on a lake where houseboats recreate the drawing rooms of Kent, heavy with antimacassars and oak furniture. He found the shikara boys “an aqueous version of dodgems, men in skullcaps chitter-chattering, others gliding around with chillies and onions”.
An early section of the book finds him in Belfast. The Shankill and Falls were “the cursed names we grew up with, and on to which we projected our most lurid fears”. But in recent years the city has changed radically from the one he recalls from his youth and now at the heart of global film production he discovers a place that has become “an ever more popular home to fairy tale and romance”. With a love of Van Morrison’s songs, he tours locations in east Belfast referenced in the musician’s repertoire and is enraptured by the streets that have held his imagination for half a lifetime.
There are many parts of the world to which Iyer is constantly drawn back. One such city is Jerusalem, “a paradise of calm” with its Holy Sepulchre church where many believe Jesus was crucified. A guide in Nazareth once told him: “If I’ve left you feeling frustrated and confused, I’ve succeeded! Now you know what it’s like to be an Israeli!” But in Jerusalem more than anywhere else hope remains as stubborn as resentment. “It had to: to give up on Jerusalem, after all, that it had survived, was to give up on even the prospect of improving our lot.”
In a whirlwind tour of many countries and cultures, Iyer indulges in a rich diversity of continent-hopping, navigating the territory through the eyes of locals
Many decades ago, Iyer befriended the Dalai Lama and travelled with him across Japan on 10 trips in 12 years. He was struck by his realism and how as a leader of his people he had no interest in wishful or romantic notions: “I remember how the Dalai Lama, with his emphasis on facts and empiricism, often suggested that the seclusion of Himalayan cultures had perhaps allowed them to develop skills in meditation that had resulted in spiritual technologies not so refined yet in the West.” The spiritual leader, he recounts, also reminded fellow Buddhists that “paradise can be found only in the middle of what’s around us”.
In a whirlwind tour of many countries and cultures, Iyer indulges in a rich diversity of continent-hopping, navigating the territory through the eyes of locals. But open this book at random and you also will be transported to foreign climes as the author guides you through a paradisical focus. A perceptive writer, Iyer is a literary traveller par excellence with a wide range of references, invoking authors and poets such as Rumi, Marco Polo, Thoreau, Herman Melville and Thomas Merton.
When in Sri Lanka, a place that seemed to him to owe much of its centuries-old status as an earthly paradise, he felt his presence enabled the island to affix a sticker of “Paradise” on top of more thorny truths. With an acute sense of place, Iyer produces a blend of sharp observation and poetically charged wistfulness plunging deep into the soul of a region. The beauty of travel, he concludes, is that a visitor can see graces in a place that locals may take for granted.
- Paul Clements’s latest book is Life from Both Sides, Jan Morris: A Biography (Scribe)
