Pico Iyer finds peace even in lost paradises

We all have our vision of a paradise travel destination. Mine was Tahiti, based on exotic remoteness and those pictures of glorious atolls with their cerulean blue lagoons – until I went there and discovered a severe underlying drugs problem among the island’s youth, and whispering discontent.

Herman Melville once talked of how ‘the soul of man was an insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life’. It’s a phrase that gives Pico Iyer his title for this intriguing collage of such places which might, and should, be considered paradise, but that human intervention has spoiled. Like Satan surveying the Garden of Eden, the reader can take a certain mordant pleasure in the process. There can be a piquancy in the thought that the roses now have thorns.

In Kashmir, some half a million Indian soldiers have turned the most emotive victim of Partition into one of the most heavily militarised zones in the world.