NATURAL OPIUM

Peevish, polished travel reports by a novelist (Health and Happiness, 1990, etc.), biographer (Dashiell Hammett, 1983), and book critic (Terrorists and Novelists, 1982). Johnson's voyages, which range from Thailand to Utah, have taught her that ``travel brings us as nothing else does to a sense of ourselves,'' and that, when interacting with locals, ``the actual existence of these people is irrelevant to the passions...they arouse.'' This, then, is a self-referential, almost solipsistic approach to travel in which the voyager becomes an armored vehicle nosing through alien lands, shooting barbed observations at will. A typical interlude occurs on a ``tiny, shabby'' boat off Australia, when Johnson sneers that another passenger ``had no conversations, had never been anywhere...I thought about how sad it was to be him.'' Later, though, she admits that ``I know I've been a pig''; Johnson never hesitates to turn her guns on herself. Balancing this sniping is her splendid descriptive talent; stepping on to the Great Barrier Reef, she finds it ``entirely alive, made of eyeless formations of cabbagey creatures sucking and opening and closing, yearning towards tiny ponds of water.'' But sourness rules the day. In India, a potentially funny episode concerning a cracked bottle of wine turns into a fiasco; in Africa, Johnson scolds ivory traders; in Switzerland, ``there seemed to be nothing pink, light, luxurious, no concept of decor.'' The author's vision seems blinkered, in part, by her social class: In Japan, she complains that ``all is Vuitton bags and Chanel,'' and usually she finds peasants frightening or disgusting. Travels in England, South Africa, Egypt, Singapore, and China leave the same bitter aftertaste. Johnson's honesty is admirable: Isolation and discomfort are part of the traveler's lot, unacknowledged in the guidebooks. But most travelers find ways to overcome them, and very few make their readers suffer through the ordeal. Just like natural opium: crystalline images and insights that leave a nasty headache. Maybe Johnson should have stayed at home.