Back in the Sixties, if you wanted a fruitful, freakout-free LSD experience, you might have called on Mrs Aldous Huxley in Los Angeles, where she lived as a beatifically attuned Buddhist adept until her death in 2007. Aldous Huxley, her husband, had emigrated to America 70 years earlier in search of spiritual solace and the ‘benediction’ offered by psychotropic drugs. Evelyn Waugh was not alone in thinking that the States had driven Huxley dotty. Jim Morrison, the psychedelic Frank Sinatra, named his California band The Doors after Huxley’s crackpot hymn to the mescaline experience, The Doors of Perception.
Tim Lott’s sixth novel, Under the Same Stars, dilates entertainingly on British attitudes to America as a supermarket for far-out fads and Huxley-like cults. Henry Nash, a disaffected Englishman, had left for New Mexico 30 years ago, having abandoned his wife and two sons to their home in suburban north London.
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