Sun After Dark

Review by Philip Blazdell

Pico Iyer is a wonderful writer. He is perhaps the best travel writer of his generation. When he flexes his artistic powers, expressions of such eloquence pour from his pen that it makes the reader swoon. He can take even the most mundane of scenes or situations and describe them in such vivid detail that the reader is enveloped in such a dream-like state that its hard to believe you are reading mere literature. At his best, his work is ephemeral and boarding on the religious. However, when he is average, he is very average and, unfortunately, there are few pieces in this book which transcend averageness. 'A trip has really been successful if I come back sounding strange even to myself,' says the author at one point but his voice remains subdued and somewhat tired throughout this anthology of stories.

This anthology of exotic explorations takes the reader from L.A. and Yemen to Haiti and Ethiopia, from a Bolivian prison to a hidden monastery in Tibet. He goes to Cambodia, where the main tourist attraction is a collection of skulls from the Khmer Rouge killing fields, and travels through southern Arabia in the weeks before September 11, 2001. He practices meditation with Leonard Cohen and discusses geopolitics with the Dalai Lama, travels to Easter Island and through the imaginative terrains of W. G. Sebald and Kazuo Ishiguro.

But, this work has little of the poetic majesty of, for example, The Lady or the Monk, or any of the deep philosophical musings that made Falling off the Map such a divine read. Although, Iyer gives the feeling, in his writing and in his travelling, of being there and not there and though conscientiously alive to the cultural nuances of Tibet or Angkor Wat, he more often than not appears landlocked in his own head. It seems that the deeper Iyer dives into a culture and the more he stretches for the perfect idiom the less meaningful his work becomes.

However, there is one essay, which is so well written and so beautifully conceived that it alone justifies buying the book. Nightwalking describes the feeling and sensation of jet lag. "Things carry a different value, a different heft, when you're jet-lagged," he writes, "but there's no counter on which the exchange rates are posted." Jet lag, he hazards, releases him from the illusion of the self. As he sleeplessly prowls around his everyday worlds, the familiar becomes almost foreign. Inequalities he'd take for granted in a normal working day are now starkly highlighted. If only all the essays in this book were to this standard then this would be a truly magnificent book, instead of being merely readable.

• Sun After Dark by Pico Iyer