Observer Review: The Promised Land By Decca Aitkenhead Essay, Research Paper

Take the high roadThe Promised LandDecca AitkenheadFourth Estate? 12.99, pp217Decca Aitkenhead admits that her original lineation for The Promised Land offered to & # 8217 ; overthrow the genre & # 8217 ; of travel authorship. This turns out to hold been a foolish proposal on two counts & # 8211 ; foremost, because she & # 8217 ; d read really few travel books, and 2nd, because The Promised Land really does no such thing. Which is non to state that it & # 8217 ; s either predictable or dull.Aitkenhead discovered rapture as a pupil in Manchester in the early 1990s, and acknowledges that one of its key belongingss is to go forth users hankering to re-live their first great times on the drug, their & # 8216 ; newly minted amazement of felicity & # 8217 ; . In a supernaturally aged effort to recapture her young person, she hence conceived the thought of touring the universe in hunt of the perfect E.At foremost sight a daft pursuit, since the overpowering bulk of ecstasy pills come from the same topographic point, Amsterdam, this turns out in fact to intend the perfect clubbing experience, instead than the perfect chemical mixture. Fortunately for her readers, Aitkenhead isn & # 8217 ; t much interested in the solipsistic high, and resolves non to tire on about the effects of her assorted doses of MDMA.What she craves is to be with other people, in nines that are new to her. & # 8216 ; Without the surprise, & # 8217 ; she explains, & # 8216 ; ecstasy can offer merely pleasance ; it can do you experience good, likely better than most, but this is private satisfaction, non corporate wonder. & # 8217 ; Her existent topic is other people & # 8217 ; s topographic points: her pursuit to purchase drugs and happen somewhere decent to take them is merely a manner of acquiring to cognize them.In her custodies, the differences in clubbing civilization between Detroit, Ko Samui and Cape Town turn out to be a surprisingly serious topic. Her observations are peaky with attitude ; in Thailand she notes: & # 8216 ; It was of import to hold a tan deep plenty to convey that you took being a backpacker earnestly. The right place of the knot in one & # 8217 ; s sarong was a minefield ; we watched one miss discreetly tie and re-tie hers in the contemplation of a window for 15 minutes. & # 8217 ; But this is more than mere attitudinizing ; the feelings pile up into analysis & # 8211 ; in this instance, the ( true non wholly original ) decision that the tourers in the Oriental in Bangkok and the travelers at the full Moon rave are botching Thailand every bit. You feel it, though, because the authorship is so passionate.It & # 8217 ; s merely every bit good that Aitkenhead has produced such an intelligent and absorbing book, because it becomes clear good before she eventually & # 8216 ; fesses up to it that her undertaking is flawed. She is prosecuting hedonism as a signifier of work, which, when you think about it, invalidates the whole thing. I kept holding visions of her hotfooting off to the lavatories non to up her chemical consumption but to acquire the trader & # 8217 ; s mannerisms down in her notebook. ( If she didn & # 8217 ; t make this she has a colossal memory, because her descriptions are amusing and acute. ) This interlingual rendition of the high I

nto difficult work may be why a batch of the book has a instead dissatisfied tone. ( Although, evidently, if she’d merely had a batch of lovely drugs and a superb clip, there wouldn’t have been much transcript. ) One of the jobs of composing about such immensely different topographic points as San Francisco and South Africa, Thailand and Amsterdam is that they demand rather different responses. Aitkenhead dramatis personaes herself and her hubby ( who was with her throughout ) in more than one familiar travel-writer function. Hapless foreigners in San Francisco, hopelessly unable to entree any drugs, they become aghast progressives among Ko Samui’s saloon misss and fat foreign clients. And although the overruling tone is one of defeat – why aren’t things working out better? – these displacements of stance do give the book a certain unevenness.In Cape Town, Aitkenhead and her hubby non merely partied but besides met prima figures in the drug packs and the every bit barbarous strategies set up to antagonize them. They toured the townships with the constabulary and concluded that ‘the force that dark was so careless and complete, it felt likely to travel on for ever’.The South African subdivision is a sustained and insightful piece of news media – more truly engaged with topographic point than her brushs with flower peoples in San Francisco or tourers in Thailand. It provides the best play – when a rummy, huffy pack leader points a laden gun at her caput ; and the best meeting – an drawn-out interview with a mild-mannered Boer husbandman whose homicidal racism is amazing even in the context of Boer husbandmans. Aitkenhead concludes that the chief job with taking rapture is that it implicates the clubber in all of this and helps fuel the force. ( She rejects this appraisal in the concluding chapter, when she takes ecstasy among the peaceable people of Amsterdam, but it retains some of its force. ) To the non-user, the most surprising consequence of MDMA is that its chase leads otherwise absolutely reasonable people to make such drilling and awful things, frequently at the same clip. It is to Aitkenhead’s recognition that she writes about her trek so thoughtfully and wittily. The top of the little variability of tone is that her authorship has fantastic scope, from jaded sarcasm to passionate analysis. She is particularly good at the dexterously flicked image – like her description of the Detroit hotel, ‘the response staffed by adult females in beige nylon who looked as if they had been crying’.Aitkenhead admits that she hoped ( as, no uncertainty, did her publishing houses ) that her book would be ‘hardcore cool’ . The Promised Land does hold something of The Beach-type glamor. But the drugs aren’t truly the point. Drugs, like traveling, are about the chase of felicity, and Aitkenhead’s dogged chase of a good party is obliging, non least because it eventually seems so boring. As she says: ‘Because nil the traveler does is of all time purely necessary, there’s no alibi for anything to be less than brilliant.’ The chase of felicity – progressively the aspiration of human existences – can be a exhausting thing.

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