Spectator Life

“You can never be too rich or too thin”: so said Wallis Simpson, would-be consort to Edward VIII. Or perhaps Dorothy Parker. Or perhaps Joan Rivers. No one really knows. But whoever said it, Japan appears to have had it engraved on its national escutcheon. Japan is officially the world’s thinnest rich country, with an obesity rate of just 4.3 percent of the population. By comparison, it’s 40 percent in the US. A close comparison to Japan is Bangladesh, where the rate is 4.5 percent – but where one in ten people is dangerously undernourished. These are extraordinary statistics. What on earth is going on?  The most reached-for reason is diet. Japanese food, so it is thought, is healthy and lean.

I am sitting in the Ottoman courtyard at Ruin Adalya in the old town of Antalya, drinking a tulip glass of black sweet tea and munching near-perfect baklava, and twenty feet beneath me the Romans are still there. That is to say, the Ottoman courtyard is paved with Lycian limestone but sections of it are now made of glass, and through the glass I can see the old Roman road.  Which, as metaphorical launchpads go, will do very nicely. Yes, Antalya has, as many Brits know, fine beaches, serious resorts, agreeably cheap food and wine, and the odd Roman temple. But the history of this stretch of Mediterranean coast goes back further than that, and deeper, so much deeper. And I want to trace that extraordinary depth.

What does Monte Carlo conjure up? A glamorous casino where fortunes can be won and lost, but mostly lost? Men in evening dress at baccarat tables with beautiful women standing by? A tax haven for the glitzy rich on the Cote d’Azur? Fabulous Belle Epoque buildings? A refuge for Edwardian English invalids to escape the cold? Grace Kelly? The Grand Prix?  It was here that Max de Winter met the girl who became the second Mrs de Winter at the beginning of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. "What do you think of Monte Carlo, or don't  you think of it at all?" he asked her. "I said something  obvious and idiotic about the place being  artificial," she recalled.  Well, she was pretty much correct.

There are few things that look sadder than an abandoned sports field. I spent longer than I meant to sitting on a decaying bench looking out over the forest that was once the intended playing surface for the Stroitel Pripyat soccer club. The sky above was cerulean, cloudless and entirely still. The only life came from my hand-held Geiger counter which spluttered and crackled, telling me that I was in a territory that wasn’t fit for a stroll, let alone 90 minutes of lung-bursting athleticism.

As a general rule, once a city erects turnstiles to tourist attractions which were once free to visit, it is time to go elsewhere. Never more so than in the case of Rome. Last week the Italian capital introduced a €2 charge to visit the Trevi Fountain. Tight-fisted tourists like me will still be able to see the Trevi from a distance – it happens to stand in a public street. The charge will be only for sad Instagrammers who want to get close enough to chuck their coins in the water. The city’s tourism department has suggested the fee is needed to manage the throngs of holidaygoers. Even then, God forbid, they won’t be able to take off their sandals and take a dip – that will earn them a €500 fine. Which raises the question: why bother visiting the fountain at all?

“People don’t actually do that, right?” my publisher asked nervously. “No one actually goes on a human safari, do they?” Eight years ago, I didn’t know for sure. There had certainly been rumors for years that wealthy foreigners were traveling to conflict zones to kill civilians at random. Gradually I had concluded that some people were indeed heading off to complete their bucket list of horrors. In my novel To The Lions, I placed the “human safari” in a fictional refugee camp in southern Libya. Concrete proof, however, was almost impossible to find. Several times during my years as an investigative journalist, I heard stories about nightmarish things going on in places where law and order had collapsed.

If you say the name Franco Zeffirelli to anyone under about 40, you’re likely to be met with bemusement. Find any opera or film lover over that age, however, and you will be greeted with a warm exclamation – “Ah!” – followed by a recitation of the Italian director’s greatest achievements. From his emergence in international culture in the 1960s with his seminal film of Romeo and Juliet to his legendary work on stage with such operatic titans as Maria Callas and Plácido Domingo, Zeffirelli became synonymous with tasteful, intelligent productions of the classics, all of which made him, for a time, the best-known cultural figure in Italy. It is fair to say that Zeffirelli, who died in 2019, didn’t always get it right, personally or politically.

I am in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan. I am standing in a historic complex of madrasas and mosques, courtyards and dusty roses and I am staring at the “oldest Quran in the world.” It is a strange and enormous thing: written in bold Kufic script on deerskin parchment; it was supposedly compiled by Uthman ibn Affan, the third Caliph of Islam, who was murdered while reading it. And so it is, as I linger here and reverently regard the Book, while scrolling my phone for more fascinating info, that I discover the world’s oldest Quran is actually in Birmingham. Yes, that’s right, Birmingham, England. It’s probably in some obscure library, lodged between a thesis on post-colonial emojis and a flyer for Falafel Night.

My personal version of hell? Shibuya station, Tokyo. Shibuya Scramble is one thing: the busiest pedestrian intersection on the planet, it sees two million people elbow each other, every day. But the train station that thousands of them are trying to get to? That’s where my hopes go to die. A place where you’ll find me near tears, wondering if I’ll ever see my loved ones again. It’s almost impossible to navigate, spread across a dizzying number of floors and stuffed with throngs of human beings speaking a dozen languages. New platforms spring up all the time, often at the top of an unassuming escalator, or via a tiny hidden exit of the Hikarie shopping mall. There are (one or two) signposts, sure, but my Japanese leaves much to be desired.

It was stiflingly hot in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. I was exploring the eastern Galápagos Islands, living cheek-by-jowl on a former casino ship with a cast of characters plucked straight from a murder mystery novel: a former British supermodel, an Ecuadorian presidential candidate, the ex-drummer of a band who once supported the Who and an influencer couple who looked like they had stumbled off the set of Triangle of Sadness. The stars of the show – and boy did they know it –were the sea lions While the trip had all the ingredients to cook up an irresistible whodunit, I was not just there to inspect the wildlife on board but to observe the wildlife off it.

On a suffocatingly humid Friday morning in August, I sat in a rental car parked outside the home of Thom Robb, the leader of the Ku Klux Klan, wondering if I should knock on his door. A shirtless, muscle-bound, heavily tattooed carpenter who lived down the road – and swore he wasn’t racist or a Klansman – said Robb was “a really nice guy” who wouldn’t mind my turning up at his house without an appointment. Klansmen, I reckon, aren’t “nice” guys by definition, and as Robb’s mean-sounding dog barked at me from the other side of his fence, I feared the neighbor was setting me up to get my head blown off.

Southwest Virginia, October. Gravel groaned under my creek-numbed feet. I looked up at a mountain laid out like a fist and I climbed toward the most violent knuckle. But before I got there, the world turned on its side. I don’t know for sure why I collapsed. Maybe it was food poisoning, maybe a heart attack. I felt my face resting on cold stone and gripped the dark walnut of my rifle stock as I passed out. Eleven hours later, a new day started. A distant pickup truck with glass-pack mufflers fired up, then idled in a deep rumble. I stood – before the sun came up – and did squats for warmth, surprised I felt as good as I did, but I had a decision to make: walk off the mountain or hunt my way out. May as well hunt.