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Slade Steadman is a One Book Wonder who has been resting on his laurels since his bestselling travel book, TRESPASSING, made him a millionaire 20 years ago. The royalties from tie-ins through a clothing line, camping gear, movie and TV serialization have set him up in a mansion on Martha's Vineyard through continued residuals and unlimited access to the world of the rich and famous. It also has created impotence and mind-boggling boredom, and worst of all, acute writer's block. Try as he may, he cannot come up with even the bare bones of an idea for a follow-up book, despite the urging of his agent and publisher.
His girlfriend Ava, a Boston gynecologist, hears of a drug tour to Ecuador where they will be transported to a remote tribal village deep within the jungle interior to partake in a secret ceremony involving a hallucinatory drug. Steadman sees the spark of an idea for another travel adventure book, and agrees. They join a small group of thrill seekers in search of ayahausca, which is reputed to unleash creative powers.
His fellow adventurers include a cynical German journalist, Manfred, who spots a plant in the jungle that he recognizes as datura, the basis of atropine and scopolamine. He makes inquiries and discovers that for a price the village shaman will prepare a concoction for Steadman and Manfred. Steadman is rendered temporarily blind, but with extrasensory powers and hypersensitivity to odors, tastes and awareness. He manages, through Manfred, to secure a year's supply of the raw materials and the method for brewing the psychotropic tea needed to induce the 8-hour trance.
Back on Martha's Vineyard, Steadman and Ava delve into creating the novel THE BOOK OF REVELATION, a fictionalized autobiography of Steadman's coming of age. Steadman doses himself regularly with the drug, finding that he is blind, yet his other senses are elevated to a greater height than he ever believed possible. With Steadman dictating and Ava taping and making suggestions, the datura brings about another side effect: erotic sexual explorative episodes that he dictates through the day and plays out with Ava at night. The results are both surprising and devastating.
Steadman becomes addicted to the datura and presents himself to the public as a blind man; he becomes the famous Blind Writer. The complications that arise from maintaining the public image when the blindness is in fact only drug-induced lead to many encounters and problems between Ava and himself.
Underlying the novel is the juxtaposition of Steadman's double life as a blind man to the public and a drug user in private, against the emerging drama of Bill Clinton, whom he meets at a celebrity dinner on the island. His extrasensory perception under the influence of the datura allows him to recognize that the president is hiding a deep shame. The president is drawn to Steadman and includes him in his social circle. Steadman's charade of the public blind man is threatened to exposure while Clinton's debacle unfolds on the world stage.
Author Paul Theroux resembles his anti-hero Steadman in more than one way: he is a travel writer, but hardly a one-trick pony as he has 40 nonfiction books and novels under his belt. He also took a similar trip to Ecuador to experience the drug in order to write with authority of some of the effects. He writes of the writer's life and rubbing elbows with the rich and famous from personal experience, but in an interview stated that while he has experimented with drugs he can only write with a clear head after a good night's sleep.
--- Reviewed by Roz Shea
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