Review:
Dope in the Age of Innocence by Damien Enright
Liberties Press, €17.99, Paperback
http://www.independent.ie/entertainment/books/review-dope-in-the-age-of-innocence-by-damien-enright-2456975.html
December 11 2010
There's an old adage, 'Be careful what you wish for', that most of us
don't really believe: we always assume our dreams will turn out every
bit as wonderful and perfect in real life as the Platonic ideal in our minds.
Reading Dope in the Age of Innocence, Irishman Damien Enright's
memoir of life as a dropout in the hippie paradise of Ibiza during
the early 1960s, the truth of that phrase is hammered home.
Enright, now a well-respected writer and broadcaster on travel and
nature, fetched up there in 1960, aged just 21, with English wife
Nancy and their twin infant sons. At the time the Spanish island, now
notorious as the epicentre of the 'sun, sex and sangria' tourist
trade, was a somnambulant backwater, ostracised by Franco and
unchanged for decades.
But it was about to be transformed: American and European artists and
writers, keen to escape the materialism of their homelands, were
coming to live in Ibiza. So were handfuls of bored aristocrats and
wealthy bon viveurs -- the prototype, maybe, of today's 'Eurotrash'
-- dodgy geezers, jazz aficionados, ex-GIs. . . anyone, really, who
wanted to 'turn on, tune in, drop out', half a decade before Timothy
Leary coined his iconic phrase.
Enright, interestingly, was more idealistic, and almost naive, than
the jaded party animals and pretentious 'artistes', which perhaps
explains why he gives such a perceptive and lucid account of that time.
If one thing defines his actions throughout, I think, it's love:
feeling it, needing it, searching for it, cursing its loss,
celebrating its return. He doesn't seem to have been driven by
egotism, self-importance, thrill-seeking, or even sex and drugs, but
that most rarefied and profound drive of all, love.
Soon after arriving in Ibiza, Enright's wife leaves him for another;
he goes to England, where they had met, and falls in love with Hanna.
They save up their shekels and return to this Mediterranean Shangri-La.
One night they drop acid -- a brilliantly depicted episode (see
extract right), which really captures the weirdness and odd beauty,
the sense of something almost sanctified -- and the scales fall from
their eyes.
They see the Ibiza scene for its falsity and shallowness, and decamp
to the nearby island of Formentera: even smaller, quieter, further
from the mainstream. Surviving on a pittance -- they gather snails to
sell or subsist on parental charity -- and with a baby daughter to
care for, Damien heads to London to carry out a travellers' cheque scam.
This is where the story really turns sour. He ends up, at various
stages, taking heroin, splitting with Hanna, scoring hash in
dangerous Turkey, lying low from the police . . . basically going
through several circles of his own private hell. (Towards the end of
the book he name-checks Rimbaud's classic poem, Une Saison en Enfer
[A Season in Hell], which seems appropriate.)
But even before then, reading about life on the Balearic islands, you
sense the rottenness under the surface of this supposed idyll. Which
brings us back to 'Be careful what you wish for'.
The counterculture lifestyle, with its promises of free love, groovy
toons, mindbending drugs and nobody telling you what to do, sounds
fantastic in theory. The reality -- at least what I gathered from
Enright's memoir -- was shabby, hysterical, sordid and rather
pathetic. These were reckless, immature and narcissistic people, who
appeared to drag their kids up rather than rear them, and floated
forever in the impermeable bubble of their toxic self-regard.
Same as it ever was, really. Indeed it's sad how these
let's-all-hold-hands-and-live-free ideals invariably turn to
disillusionment, bitterness and emotional scarring. But there's
another old phrase: the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
.
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