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I like books like this, which take on the philosophical and political through the recounting of practical and personal experience. The Devil’s Picnic has just the right measure of each to provide the balance that I prefer.

Grescoe’s book charts a year-long exploration of forbidden or proscribed substances and foods, from Nowegian moonshine, through unpasteurised French cheese, to the coca tea of Bolivia. With each chapter dedicated to the exploration of a certain substance, Grescoe searches, samples and interviews his way across the world. There’s a hint of journalistic license here – what are obviously planned meetings sometimes seem to be presented as happenstance. It’s not quite as adventurous as Grescoe meakes out; but this doesn’t really matter – the substances and the cultures that surround them are in the foreground and Grescoes musings on the subject are more interesting than what he actually does.

And what he does is to examine the way that societies come to prohibit and regulate the consumption of illicit substances. Grescoe’s political stance here should come as no surprise – you don’t write a book about flying around the world, seeking out semi-legal substances if you think they should be prohibited. The same could be said of the potential reader of such a book – I doubt there’s all that many ardent prohibitionists who want to read a book-length argument against their ideals. It’s mostly preaching to the choir, though Grescoe does take time to highlight the double standard many liberals seem to have regarding tobacco.

Unsurprisingly, I’m part of the congregation on this one. I actually studied this kind of stuff when I was at university (my dissertation was about the connections between the War on Drugs and the War on Terror). At the heart of almost every sane argument on the subject is one idea: The harms associated with prohibition vastly outweigh the harms associated with the substance itself. I don’t want to turn this into a rant on the subject (it’s an easy subject to rant about, so maybe some other time), but it’s astonishingly frustrating that, with a few European exceptions, governments seem to be utterly incapable of even having a sensible debate on the subject, despite the frightening costs, both financial and to human life, of the prevailing policies.

There are an astounding number of books that are essentially the same rant as the one I’ve just narrowly avoided. This isn’t really one of them, but it does build a similar case, chapter by chapter. Gresoe sums up with this:

There is, after all, a middle ground between abstinence and excess: it’s called moderation, and once you’re out of the thicket of post-adolescent overdramatization, it becomes a lot more attainable. Getting there requires a certain amount of maturity and self-knowledge; unfortunately, in a context where prohibition is the reigning world-wide paradigm, where paternalistic laws keep us in protracted adolescense by professing to protect us from ourselves, most people are prevented from every thinking in shades of gray. Since the Harrison Act of 1914 kicked off worldwide drug prohibition, intoxication has become a black-and-white issue. You are either on the righteous side of the line, or in a world of shame, picknicking with the devil.

Che Guevara’s never been one of my heroes and I’ve never owned any item of apparel, any badges, or any poster featuring the famous portrait captured in Guerrillero Heroico. I tend to associate that photo (I bet you know which one I mean without clicking on that link) with a rather shallow affectation of rebellion. It’s not that I revere him, or think his image needs protection, but if I had my way anyone wearing a t-shirt featuring El Che’s image should have it confiscated if they can’t provide brief biographical details.

“Yes officer, certainly, Che was born in Argentina, met Fidel Castro and joined the 26th of July movement, helped overthrow Batista, the Cuban dictator and was killed while trying to foment revolution in Bolivia.”

I think this rule should apply to anyone who wears someone else’s image, but Che Guevara is a morally complicated figure, who had people executed – which makes it slightly more important than knowing who, for example, André the Giant is. I’m sure that plenty of people who do have more than a cursory knowledge of Guevara choose to wear his image, but I’m far from certain that they’re in the majority.

I don’t approve of Guevara’s actions or his philosophy strongly enough to wear his image myself (I’d also prefer people like me to not assume that I’m shallow). I do think he was a courageous man who remained true to himself and his principles, even if I don’t like where those principles led him. Not that my opinion on him is all that important, but that’s what I brought with me when I started reading The Motorcycle Diaries, the travelogue of his journey across South America as a young man.

Guevara’s travels and adventures are charming and laddish, full of drama, narrow escapes and the brief friendships of the road. Guevara has an eye for detail and presents a ground-eye view of 1950′s South America, with all its post-colonial poverty and majesty. While the adventure stuff is pretty standard fare, Guevara is at his best when describing the people and places he finds himself in. I particularly like his description of a festival in Lima:

We arrived as the bullfight was starting and just as we entered, a novitiate was killing a bull, but not in the normal way by a coup de grace. As a result, the bull was suffering, laid out on the ground, while the toreador tried to finish it off and the public shouted. For the third bull there was considerable excitement in the air, but that was it. The fiesta closed with the almost unnoticed death of the sixth bull. Art, I see none; courage, a certain level; skill, not much; excitement, relative. In summary, it all depends what there is to do on a Sunday.

It makes for interesting reading, but if they had been written by someone other than Guevara, I’m not sure that it would have the same effect. What makes The Motorcycle Diaries interesting is the knowledge that this twenty-three year old boy would, just a few years later, become an armed revolutionary, then a martyr, then a cultural icon. As the book progresses you get the feeling that Guevara’s political views are slowly forming as he becomes more worldly and meets with poverty and injustice.

I’d probably have got more from the book if I bought into the pop-culture status of Guevara as Saint of Revolutions. As it is, The Motorcycle Diaries were an enjoyable distraction from a miserable British winter. And if I do ever find myself in a Che t-shirt, I’ll be justified in keeping it.

What is there to say about Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, his chaotic, semi-autobiographical rant of a novel? Since it’s widely regarded as one of the more important works of 20th century literature, probably very little that’s new or interesting. But here goes…

It’s interesting how Tropic of Cancer encapsulates the essentials of gonzo journalism nearly forty years before Hunter S. Thompson came up with the term. With his goal of “recording of all that which is omitted in books”, Miller engages in a hyper-real blending of fact and fiction, with prose that veers between confessional and psychedelic. Like Raoul Duke of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, he’s a morally questionable, yet eminently likable protagonist. In every way, Tropic was way ahead of its time.

If I knew more about 1930′s literature, I’d situate the book in the context of its times. But the best I could do is some vague babbling about D.H. Lawrence and James Joyce, so I won’t embarass myself by trying. But I prefer Miller to either of them. Lawrence feels so much more self-conscious and Joyce much more impenetrable. Miller’s work remains accessible today in a way that other literature of the period hasn’t, at least for me. While there’s not really a coherent story, there’s certainly a coherent philosophy and it’s expressed in every way that Miller can find. I think this passage sums it up best:

Once I thought that to be human was the highest aim a man could have, but I see now that it was meant to destroy me. Today I am proud to say that I am inhuman, that I belong not to men and governments, that I have nothing to do with creeds and principles. I have nothing to do with the creaking machinery of humanity – I belong to the earth!

Tropic is a manifesto of liberation, it’s about Miller’s struggle to break free from every kind of repression. The many explicit and often-crude sexual references are justified in a way that would be prurient in most other works. It’s not the celebration of sex that Lawrence wrote about, or Joyce’s symbolic sexuality, it’s sex as a rejection of repression, as a blatant and fierce act of rebellion. It’s not all about sex – again and again in Tropic Miller breaks free from every attempt to constrain him, culminating in an frenetic episode in which Miller becomes a liberator, decisively getting a friend out from a marriage he was forced into. The intention of the novel wasn’t just to describe freedom, but to actively inspire it in others.

It’s compelling and direct. Maybe it’s just as powerful a book today as it was when it was published in 1934. I don’t know – it’s not like I was around then to compare. But it’s as powerful for me today as it was when I first read it at 16.