Pico Iyer takes the reader on a philosophical journey around the world and asks the question ‘what kind of paradise can ever be found in a world of unceasing conflict?
Review by Shafik Meghji
Travel writers have been searching for Shangri-La and promised lands, lost worlds and enchanted valleys for as long as the genre has existed, but heaven on Earth is a notoriously slippery and elusive concept. As avant-garde artist and musician Laurie Anderson sang, ‘Paradise is exactly like where you are right now, only much, much better.’
In The Half Known Life, Pico Iyer takes a fresh approach to the trope by setting out to explore ‘what kind of paradise can ever be found in a world of unceasing conflict – and whether the very search for it might not simply aggravate our differences’. Deftly weaving together multiple trips across many years to everywhere from Belfast to North Korea, the Australian Outback to Varanasi, this meditative book starts in Iran, whose ancient walled gardens (‘pairidaēza’ in old Persian) are the source of the word ‘paradise’. Iyer – the author of 16 books, including Video Night in Kathmandu, The Global Soul and A Beginner’s Guide to Japan – slips into crowds of pilgrims at Shia shrines and muses about the imagery of poets such as Ferdowsī, while worrying about the reach of Iranian state surveillance. In Japan, he travels to a mountaintop Buddhist temple, high above Gokurakubashi, the ‘Bridge of Heaven’, where there was ‘snow on the ground often, not a figure visible; bells tolled between the trees, and almost nothing I could see told me which century I was in’.
Iyer shows that being dubbed a paradise often feels like a curse. The desire to lounge on a houseboat on the serene waters of Dal Lake in the ‘honeymooners’ valley’ of Kashmir continues to draw travellers, but when they arrive, they face a ‘reality of roadblocks and regular confrontations’. In a Sri Lanka beset by division and disaster, the ‘calmest place in the land was a city of the dead’.
As ever with Iyer, the journey is as much internal as external, a philosophical blend of memories and connections, observations and encounters. By the time you reach the end of The Half Known Life, paradise feels a little closer at hand, if still tantalisingly out of reach.
