Enfield's greatest gift to English literature

SPIRITUALISTS never die; they simply "pass to spirit". Norman Lewis, a well-preserved 90, is the son of a psychic medium, which may account for his longevity. Thus far, he has written 13 novels and 10 glittering travel books.

I hope he continues well into the millennium.

In 1937 Mrs Lewis built a spiritualist church in Enfield. Lewis spent a happy childhood in the north London suburb, a genteel pocket of the paranormal. His humdrum background - palmistry, aspidistras is a far cry from the privilege of most travel writers. Lewis was never a patrician pathfinder in the Colin Thubron mould. He began his working career in the mid-Thirties with a camera shop in Holborn. But his lifelong interest in the off beat goes back, I think, to the mediums and moonshine of his Enfield years.

In this scintillating collection of travel essays, Lewis investigates everything from snake-fetishism in southern Italy to shamanism in Liberia.

The tone throughout is engagingly quizzical and pokerfaced. This is the man who once smoked opium in Cambodia "like a timid experimenter, perhaps, in a nudist colony". Lewis is one of the great comic writers of our age and his account here of Irian Jaya ancestor- worship is a hoot.

Over 45 years of writing for a living, Lewis has developed an eccentric voice. The subtle exactitude of his prose - curiously formal, sometimes Latinate - is a delight to read. Increasingly, a note of gloom has crept into the comedy. Lewis deplores what he calls the "encroaching ugliness of our age" and especially of mass-tourism.

His piece on a remote Catalonian fishing village is a jeremiad, full of the old man's loathing for the Costa Brava.

Like Graham Greene, Norman Lewis is sourly anti-American and he reserves a special contempt for McDonald's. Evangelical missionaries have force-fed Paraguayan Indians on the burgers, causing them to develop fatal metabolic disorders, he says.

Lewis is indignant at the maltreatment of Latin American tribes by Bible-Belt fanatics. Published elsewhere, an earlier article on the extermination of Brazilian Indians led to the foundation of Survival International.

It's odd that Norman Lewis never met Graham Greene. They had written about the same places Laos, Vietnam, Panama - and shared a predilection for the seedy.

In Cuba, Lewis stayed in the very hotel where Greene was writing Our Man in Havana, but the authors failed to cross paths.

There's a lovely account of the 1960s prawn-eating craze sparked off in Havana by Ernest Heming-way. The American was probably the saddest person Lewis ever met.

For much of his time in Havana, the great man lay sprawled in a haze of Dubonnet, emotionally abject. It was a lesson for Lewis on the futility of fame.

Northern Europe is generally too clean and antiseptic to interest Lewis ("about Geneva," he has said, "I could never write"), so his interview here with a former Gestapo chief in Austria is unusual. Lewis served as an intelligence officer in the last war and was briefed to grill the Fhrer's henchmen. The Private Secretary is a chilling piece of reportage.

Lewis describes the Nazi as one "who knew how to enter and leave a room without the occupants being aware of his presence".

Actually this is a reasonable description of Lewis himself. With his toothbrush moustache and suede desert boots, the Sage of Enfield could slip unnoticed anywhere. In fact, Lewis has gone underground in the Mekong Delta for contacts with Viet-Minh gueril-las and hobnobbed with the Mafia (his first wife was part of a Sicilian Cosa Nostra clan).

Some of the pieces were written for Sunday supplements and have the hurried feel of a brief excursion on commission, expenses paid. So The Happy Ant-Heap is inevitably a patchy collection. But only Norman Lewis could tell us that Spam was coveted as an aphrodisiac in wartime Naples.

Copyright 1998
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