Opium

December 29, 1997
Opium was a common drug among the ancient Greeks (who extolled the "healing dreams" it brought on), a convenient poison for the Romans, a narcotic in medieval England and a popular painkiller and sedative in 19th-century Europe and America. Veteran British author Booth takes us from P. somniferum to "black gold," compellingly documenting the influential role of the opiate trade throughout history. British colonizers, for example, used both legal and illicit opium production as a chief source of revenue in India, while for Dutch, British and Portuguese traders opium was a means to pacify and carve up China. The CIA's alleged drug-dealing exploits--to finance covert operations and to bribe local leaders--are also amply documented here. Although Booth delves into the opiate-taking habits of Graham Greene, Wilde, Cocteau, Dickens, Poe and Coleridge, he doesn't romanticize drug use. While the facts can be rather dry, his comprehensive, nation-by-nation survey of international narcotics trafficking--which he views as a global societal disorder--may deter potential initiates. This history of the mechanics of the heroin trade industry brings us right to the present, where the market for the drug, Booth argues, is tied up with legitimate global trade.

Starred review from June 14, 1999
A novelist (Hiroshima Joe) and nonfiction writer (Opium: A History), Booth is a British author too little known here. This very strong book, shortlisted for the Booker Prize last year, should introduce him to discriminating readers. As in Hiroshima Joe, the hero is an ordinary man thrust into a forgotten corner of history, who becomes a player in an extraordinary situation. Alexander Bayliss was a British businessman on a visit to the Soviet Union in the 1950s when he was arrested as a spy and sent into the Siberian gulag. Now, on his 80th birthday, he has become a cherished fixture in the tiny Russian village where he went to live after his release with the daughter of one of his dear companions of the gulag, who had died in a mining accident. Known to the peasants as Shurik, he has been the village schoolteacher, an angel of enlightenment who has helped open the eyes of some of the local children to a wider world. But his identity has at last been discovered; the British Embassy in Moscow has sent a car, and a long-forgotten cousin is on his way to meet him. Shurik/Bayliss must decide: what is he to do with what remains of his life? The book is at once a poignantly lyrical portrait of his life in Myshkino (as if the Russian countryside in summer were seen through the eyes of an English nature poet) and a harrowing account of his life as a zek--one of the countless thousands of political prisoners who toiled in inhumanly brutal conditions in the Arctic wastes. That life also brought undying comradeship of a kind that makes conventional friendships seem tame, and in one unforgettable scene Bayliss has to make a terrible choice for his dearest friend. In another indelible passage, his little crew is sent to uncover a woolly mammoth long frozen in the ice. Through it all, Bayliss is a model of modest goodness and tenderness, one of the most lovable creations in recent fiction. His story is at once horrifying and deeply affecting, a paean to what is eternal in the Russian spirit--and the work of a sharp-eyed humanist whose powers are at full stretch.