Having been an obsessive traveller most of his life, beginning with termly commutes to Eton from his Indian parents’ home in California, Pico Iyer has lately been documenting the virtues of sitting still. A 2014 Ted Talk outlined the advantages – spiritual, environmental – of lying back and thinking of old pilgrimages or of nothing at all. This book is a mix of restlessness and the couch; it sees the author reporting on and recalling journeys through some of the world’s most divided and chaotic places – Kashmir, Jerusalem, Sri Lanka, North Korea among others – mostly in search of a bit of peace and quiet.
Iyer, now 65, has always been in thrall to clouds of unknowing, prizing glimpses of the ethereal in remote corners, clocking up air miles and epiphanies. He spent some time with Leonard Cohen in the five years he was a Zen Buddhist monk at Mount Baldy, near Los Angeles. He has been a friend and confidant of the Dalai Lama since they met at Dharamshala in 1974. He has often given the impression of a peripatetic personal Buddhism, without too much of the suffering. This particular quest – in search of the idea of paradise in the midst of political complication – is something of a summation of that roving life.
