The Global Soul - Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home
by Pico Iyer
Alfred A. Knopf; $25; 0-679-45433-0; February 13, 2000; 320 pages

      The best travel writing always includes as much personal exploration as specific geographic locations. In his latest book, The Global Soul, Pico Iyer turns the genre on its side, but with mixed results, takes the reader on a journey in which location pales beside his intense self-examination.
      Several years ago, Iyer, who describes himself as “a person with an American alien card and an Indian face and an English accent” found himself “homeless” after a fire destroyed the Santa Barbara home he sometimes shared with his parents. Yet Iyer had always felt he lived a life without a particular identification with any one country or culture. (He was educated in England, spent holidays in Southern California and now lives much of the year in Japan.) During his extensive travel around the planet, he came to realize that places such as Cuba, Peru and Indonesia were no more “foreign to me the England where I don’t look like a native, the America where I’m classified as an alien, and the India where I can’t speak a word of any of the almost two hundred languages....the very notion of home is foreign to me as the state of foreigness is the closest thing I know to home.”
      From this perspective, Iyer sees himself as a Global Soul, a person who “had grown up in many cultures all at once -- and so lived in the cracks between them...”As the world continues to cross pollinate itself, via technological advances and cultural and ethnic blending, Iyer realized he had “a strong incentive in finding out where I belonged, as, with my house burned down, I’d been stripped of a past, and of any future I’d imagined.”
      Unfortunately, the path to this objective proves to be elusive much of the time and meandering at best, with Iyer’s strongest writing coming in the final portion of the book. He begins by “moving in” (to a hotel on the premises) to the Los Angeles Airport, “a gift store with culture shock” where “no one knows where anyone is coming from (in both the Californian and the global sense) and no one really knows where anyone is at.” But for all Iyer’s wonder at the vital diversity of the setting, he seldom moves beyond a laundry list of the variety of people and shopping opportunities.
      A visit to an old friend in Hong Kong (shrewdly described as an “international Home page of a city”) is rife with more, almost numbing facts and figures. His friend, vaguely defined as an “international management consultant,” carries twenty seven large envelopes with currencies, phone cards, and tickets and lives in a hotel like setting with a mall containing four cinemas, over twenty restaurants, ninety seven boutiques and numerous department stores. Throughout the book, a constant barrage of statistics and brand name goods doesn’t replace the lack of insightful commentary Iyer is so capable of giving us. Iyer never seems interested in questioning the environmental and spiritual cost of all this consumption. And the description of the go-go lifestyle of his friend doesn’t really address Iyer’s own identity issues.
      In Toronto, Iyer is exhilarated by the vibrant multicultural community -- “not a melting pot, as people...politely reminded, but a mosaic,” -- because the tenor of the place for “a Global Soul...is that he can make the collection of his selves something greater that the whole; that diversity can leave him not a dissonance but a higher symphony.” Yet friends living there find the melange of cultures isolating as opposed to unifying. “The problem is,” says one, “it’s all theoretical. Everyone is told, ‘Be who you are,’ and so everybody is taught to resist. Multiculturalism here is about resisting; it’s not about sharing.”
      And in Atlanta, during the Olympics, “a curious conundrum for people such as me, if only because they affirm affiliation to nation states in an age that has largely left them behind....”, Iyer finds the city of Reconstruction a “small town’s idea of what a big city should be” and little more than a segregated backwater. While his look at the spirit of the Games is informative, it’s his dissection of the city that resonates.
      The final chapters find Iyer at his best. A sojourn to old haunts in England segues into a brilliant and revealing dialog with an elderly Indian friend who with supreme irony laments that he’s now more English than the English themselves, yet cultural change has left him convinced “The only true English people you’ll find now are born abroad -- maybe because they share our romance of England and don’t know what the reality is. ...I find myself agreeing with the people I want to hate.”
      And when he at last returns to the rural Japanese countryside where he lives with his Japanese girlfriend, Hiroko, Iyer is at his most eloquent. The depth of his love for Hiroko is moving and we glimpse, all too briefly, the Global Soul for once feeling as much as “home” as he can be. His entry through customs, each time, is a xenophobic comedy of errors, but the isolation and peacefulness he envelopes himself in are priceless. “In the postmodern world,” writes Iyer, “ to invert Robert Frost, home is the place where, when you have to go there, they don’t have to take you in.”