Book Review

Spirituality, idealism and washing up

Utopian Dreams: a search for a better life

This is a marvellous and surprising book that sweeps you off your feet. It begins unpromisingly. Jones is cheesed off with the world, and he is packing his bags. "I find everything false and fanatical," he moans. It's the familiar malaise. He is travelling constantly, he is spending hundreds of pounds on clothes he never wears. He and his friends are increasingly caught up in "a vortex of debonair desperation", something that sounds pretty bearable to me. It's not easy to warm to a man driven to antidepressants by the pressures of having too many pairs of shoes to choose from.

I've made up my mind that I know just where this book is going to go. Jones might be tiresome but you can tell right off that he's a terrific writer who's going to give us a decently entertaining romp in pursuit of "a better life" via a selection of ashrams, monasteries and "alternative" communities. The spiritual tourist with notebook in backpack is a familiar figure in such places. Various bearded types will be asked cheeky questions, their disciples gently teased, and then marks will be awarded. In this sort of book, either materialism gets a kicking or the disciples' gullibility is exposed. Sometimes "spirituality" wins, sometimes the "world" wins.

First stop in Tobias Jones' journey is an obligatory set piece on every spiritual grand tour: the time-travelling, crystal-selling, doctrine-free New Age community. Damanhur, a village at the foot of the Italian Alps, is the real deal. The members have silly names (Dingo Onion, Penguin Fresia, Lamb Radish) and wear coloured scarves to denote their pecking order in the pyramid of cosmic enlightenment.

The Damanhurians are each busily focused on finding happiness, serenity and the perfect partner. But something's wrong, and it takes Jones a while before he starts to put his finger on what it is. As he visits other communities he realises that it is precisely this eager concentration on the individual's search for happiness that makes its achievement elusive. Somehow happiness is found only when our attention is completely focused on something, or someone, else.

The journey now takes several hairpin bends. Nomadelfia, a devoutly Catholic community in Italy; Hartrigg Oaks, a comfortable retirement complex in York with a Quaker ethos; and Libera Terra, a cooperative of recovering addicts making a living by cultivating land confiscated from convicted mafiosi. Jones consistently surprises us, offering something much more interesting than a breezy "good guru" guide. He resists lazy sparring between "other-worldly" and "worldly", between spirituality and religion, or between sacred and secular. Things are more complicated than he thought.

He wrestles with the fear that, as his understanding of what seems to make a better life possible takes an unexpected direction, he is going to be written off as a crank or a fanatic. "There's a sort of theophobia at large which quickly becomes evangelical and it's rarely long before certain words come out, ‘intolerant' and ‘fundamentalist' top of the list." It is almost with a shudder that Jones keeps discovering the same "dark secret" that distinguishes the places where the "better life" was to be found. "To talk about this would be to forfeit the sympathies and offend the tastes of the vast majority of readers." This dark secret? It is, "according to taste, the greatest or else the daftest idealism of them all: religion". Jones confesses that he is one of "Thatcher's children", a generation that doesn't do "truth", doesn't do "community" and certainly doesn't do "religion".

One of the extraordinary things about Utopian Dreams is the way it reveals that we live in an age when a quick-witted and more than averagely attentive writer can discover religion with the wonder and astonishment of an anthropologist coming across a previously unknown civilisation in a remote jungle clearing. In his excitement and enthusiasm, Jones takes bear-like scoops at questions that we are more used to seeing sociologists and theologians address more gingerly: can we steer a path between fundamentalism and relativism? Can we have community without some underlying ideal? Can a community hold together without the unifying glue of "fear of the other?" If idealism is dead, was it individualism that bumped it off?

When Jones arrives at the railway station close to Nomadelfia he is met by a small, unshaven man driving a dusty, smelly car with wonky hubcaps. Domenico belongs to a community that devotedly cares for orphans and troubled children. There are no individual possessions, no money. Its members have "shrugged off the camouflage of wealth". The children are happy and joyful and eager to learn, there's a library, good food and wine, and football on the telly. Jones is enthralled. But Domenico wryly cautions him with the authentic voice of the guardian of the better life: "Non è un paradiso". His final stop is Pilsdon in the Dorset countryside. Over a game of snooker a veteran of many experimental communities tells Jones what drew him there. "At other communities they'll be talking all day about their spiritual experiences. But Pilsdon just gets on with it."

"If it teaches anything," wrote the Anglican clergyman who reinvented Pilsdon in the 1950s in the tradition of Nicholas Ferrar's Little Gidding community, "it teaches through failure and disappointment how far we fall short in our love. It is a school for sinners and not a museum of saints." By the end of his remarkable journey into the nature of community you think that Jones really does "get it". It's less about mugging up on cosmic consciousness than it is about doing the washing up. Virtue is nothing to do with rules and everything to do with roles. We can live in a way that sits lightly on the world's affairs. We can live at right angles to it. We can have a go at turning it upside down. We can stomp off to its remotest corner and crunch our nose right up against the edge of it. But, at least in this life, the world is the one thing we can't escape from. It's what we do together in the world that's interesting.

Something rather lovely happens over the closing pages of Utopian Dreams. Jones, a restless sort, determines to be still. "I decided - a rather daft decision for a travel writer - to give up travelling. We drew a circle with a mile radius from our house and decided that that was our community." He discovers to his surprise that at the end of his street there is a household of recovering addicts and alcoholics who earn their living by recycling and selling furniture - an Emmaus community. And they can use an extra van driver.

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