Journey into the shadows

To say that Pico Iyer is a travel writer is like saying that the Dalai Lama has a spiritual side to him. In a field where most practitioners function like experienced destination guides, offering you just enough entry into a place so that the edges of its strangeness are rubbed off and made more familiar, Pico begins where the average writer leaves off.

"The physical aspect of travel is, for me, the least interesting; what really draws me is the prospect of stepping out of the daylight of everything I know, into the shadows of what I don't know, and may never know," he writes in his introduction to Sun After Dark.

"Confronted by the foreign, we grow newly attentive to the details of the world, even as we make out, sometimes, the larger outline that lies behind them."

At a time when America was warming itself in the sun, Pico decided that he was going to visit some of the poorest, most damaged, most forsaken places on earth: Ethiopia, Bolivia, Cambodia, Yemen, Haiti, Easter Island.

After 9/11, he also included some of the nations on America's list of enemies. The results, interspersed with reflections on the Dalai Lama, Leonard Cohen and that very lonely, strange traveller, W G Sebald, are gathered in Sun After Dark.

If this were all, it would be more than enough. But Pico is also a traveller of the mind, pursuing an inquiry into the deeper reaches of the soul, examining and questioning and occasionally, accepting, what he finds on his journeys.

As fellow travellers along the way from Camus ("The great courage is still to gaze as squarely at the light as at death"), to Marcus Aurelius, the emperor whose meditations are often echoed in Pico's words, knew, this is a lifelong, often lonely, quest.

The challenge before Pico is to set out what cannot be said, to share what is deeply and unequivocally personal.

"I bring back receipts, postcards, the jottings I have made, but none of them really tells the story of what I've encountered; that remains somewhere between what I can't say and what I can't know."

In Pico's case, his journeys around the world form a suspension bridge between what he knows and what he can let us know.

He sees places with a clarity that is seldom blurred by the indifference or the exhaustion or the world-weariness of the frequent traveller.

So in Addis Ababa, he notes: "In the coffee shop they were playing Muzaked versions of Christmas songs, culminating in 'Do They Know It's Christmas?' "" the song recorded to provide food for the starving of Ethiopia."

In Arabia, which we know through cliched images of sun, desert and sands, he chronicles the days of the monsoon: "Drizzle is imminent nearly always," he writes of southern Oman, "and the mist envelops everything, so that when you look down the long empty roads you see camels, and sand, and nothingness."

Nor does his vision falter when it's asked to penetrate to the heart of things. In Cambodia, where the Day of Hate when people gather in the killing fields among the mass graves has been renamed the Day of Memory, he records a nation's desperate conundrum: "Yet every prospect of new sunlight in Cambodia brings new shadows, and justice itself seems a rusty chain that will only bloody anyone who tries to touch it. To try the Khmer Rouge would be, in a sense, to prosecute the whole country: almost everyone around has some connection to the Khmer Rouge killers."

And everywhere he goes, he shares what he sees, so that his hallucinations and dreams in Bolivia, caused by the thinness of the air, seep over into our minds. It's only in Bali that we cannot follow him all the way back as he grapples with ghosts from Prospero's Isle.

The eeriest essay in Sun After Dark is "Nightwalking", an exploration of the lighter "" and darker "" side of jet lag. Pico transmutes this experience "" mundane, familiar "" into the oddest journey of them all as he explores a country where you're ambushed by time, where your mind wanders down the lonely alleys of unknown cities.

To him, jetlag is "a place that no human had ever been until forty or so years ago, and yet, now, a place where more and more of us spend more and more of our lives". This is "a deeply foreign country...more mysterious in its way than India or Morocco".

And India, where he owes blood allegiance, is simultaneously more and less mysterious than it used to be. Beguiled and bemused by the land of Hindlish and outlandish signs ("Yogic Laughter is Multi-Dimensional", "Free Foot Service"), he makes a typical effort to go beyond the obvious.

"[I] came to feel that the one companion who'd been with me all my life, the English language, had stolen away into a corner and come back in a turban, a finger to its lips."

The words of Empire, as he sees them, have now been turned into something more serviceable, like "those coughing Morris Oxfords in the street", been given new life, new hope.

The conqueror has been conquered in turn, as Vikram Seth relocates Jane Austen to "the drawing rooms of Calcutta" and Rohinton Mistry shifts Dickens into "a dusty Bombay apartment block".

"The traveller, if he comes from a place of comfort, travels, in part, to be stood on his head; to lose track of tenses, or at least to be back to essentials, free of the details of home," writes Pico in "A Journey into Light".

That's why we read Pico; so that we can regain a sense of ourselves as small dots filled with inquisitive curiosity, stranded on a swiftly tilting planet, so that we can seek out and find the strange in the familiar, the everyday in the outlandish.

SUN AFTER DARK:
Flights into the Foreign

Pico Iyer
Knopf
Price, $11.25
Pages: 223