THE LOITERLOGUE OF A COUNTER-TOURIST

Geoff Dyer is a counter-tourist. He visits well-known haunts -- Paris,
Bali, New Orleans, Miami -- without seeing a sight or snapping a picture.
He takes trips everywhere: on acid in Rome, on mushrooms in Amsterdam. At
times, he subverts the whole enterprise of travel by remaining immobile.

Of Rome's tourists, he writes, "Their itineraries were busy, they were on
the move constantly, and they flocked principally to places frequented by
pigeons." Dyer, meanwhile, "basically did nothing all day."

Fortunately, Dyer's travels are "about nothing" in the same way that
"Seinfeld" was: "Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It" is a
series of darkly comic riffs on failed plans, thwarted romance and
"energetic torpor." Nor is travelogue the only genre that Dyer bends in
this delightfully original book. His loiterlogue is also a memoir, sans
childhood, and -- as his title suggests -- a primer on self-helplessness.
"Panic, presumably, was designed with a view to extricating oneself from
danger," he reflects on a nervous flight to Libya, "so why is it that in
any potentially dangerous situation we are instructed not to panic?

If this plane were to ditch in the Mediterranean we would be urged not to
spend our final seconds panicking but to go to our deaths calmly, in the
brace position, wishing we'd paid closer attention to the emergency
evacuation demonstration."

Dyer's writing brims with offbeat insights that had me chuckling hours
later, or reading aloud to dinner companions. But his book, which grew from
an abandoned study of classical ruins, lacks key structural elements, such
as plot. As a result, it reads less like a nonfiction narrative than a
collection of short stories that tumble into each other.

The scaffolding, wobbly at times, comes from Dyer's idiosyncratic and
engaging voice.

"People taking photographs had unquestionable priority at all the best
spots," Dyer writes of Angkor Wat, the rare site where he attempts
conventional tourism, albeit in the company of a camera-impaired girlfriend
who has decided to call herself Circle. "You scarcely had the right to be
at some iconic locations unless you were taking photographs. We were the
lowest possible caste of tourists: the unseeables." Later, he laments a
similar tyranny at dusk. "Sunsets impose a heavy burden on the sightseer.

A spot acquires such a reputation as the place from which 'to watch the
sunset' that you are virtually obliged to go there." Dyer does go, and
finds tripod-wielding tourists counting down the minutes to sunset "as
though they were colleagues at Mission Control."

While deft at skewering mass tourism, Dyer doesn't dwell on its dispiriting
global reach.

Instead, he lies in wait for the rare, ecstatic moments when the traveler
wanders outside his familiar realm, into a world truly new. A walk through
a Balinese rice paddy becomes, for Dyer, a meditation on the humming
fecundity of Southeast Asia: "It was . . . a rainbow coalition of one
color: green.

There was an infinity of greens, rendered all the greener by splashes of
red hibiscus and the herons floating past, so white and big it seemed as if
sheets hung out to dry had suddenly taken wing. . . . Greenness, here, was
less a color than a colonizing impulse.

Everything was either already green -- like a snake, bright as a blade of
grass, sidling across the footpath -- or in the process of becoming so.
Statues of the Buddha were mossy, furred with green."

Dyer writes vividly, too, about the people he encounters. In Asia, he meets
vagabonds with names like Vortex and Cloudy Bongwater, and also Troy, a New
Age seeker so intent on "self-journeying" that he samples scorpion venom,
and even poison. "I wanted to experience mortality," Troy explains. "What
would happen if I died?" In Cambodia, mobbed by street urchins, Dyer
marvels at their beaming faces in a land "where the ability to keep smiling
had been more ruthlessly tested than anywhere on earth, where a smile was
both a denial of history and a victory over it."

Dyer's own character emerges in fragments, as do the travels in his book,
which spans the 1990's and ends with the author in his early 40's. A gangly
London-based novelist and critic -- his previous books include "But
Beautiful," about jazz, and "Out of Sheer Rage," a meditation on D. H.
Lawrence -- who is fond of quoting European poetry and philosophy, Dyer
occasionally brings to mind another witty, well-read English traveler,
Jonathan Raban. Both are masters at capturing minutiae that reveal the
essence of a foreign land, such as cadaverous Libya, where Dyer describes
the "Tolstoyan task" of filling out endless forms for tiny transactions,
and trying to order inedible food in an empty, overstaffed dining room so
desolate that "a restaurant on the moon could not have had less
atmosphere." Tripoli's lusterless airport, he adds, "seemed to have been
designed in such a way as to anticipate the effect of 10, 20, 30 years of
heavy smoking."

Nicotine, it turns out, is the rare drug Dyer disdains.

His travels are to substance abuse what Peter Mayle's are to dining.

In Paris, Dyer samples "skunk," a potent strain of marijuana.

In Amsterdam, psilocybin mushrooms (with a side dish of "feverish" pot). In
Rome, it's microdot LSD. In Asia, an unspecified platter of intoxicants.
Drugs don't dull Dyer's writing: quite the opposite.

The book's funniest moment, in a mushroom-clouded Dutch cafe, describes
Dyer's slapstick, losing battle to change his trousers.

A romantic walking tour of Paris turns so paranoid that Dyer's zonked date
gouges her name and number from his notebook before abandoning him.

Drug taking isn't incidental to Dyer's story, nor is it mindlessly
recreational. If there's a theme to this disjointed (and joint-ridden)
book, it's the author's quest for timelessness: the "be here now" sublimity
of 70's gurus.

Drugs, for Dyer, are one door to "the Zone," as he calls it; another is
ancient ruins.

Or both, as when he attempts what he calls "pyschedelica antiqua" in Rome,
using LSD to "achieve unmediated access to the living past." Drugs also
bond Dyer to fellow transients, infusing his trips with a lyric wistfulness
about the fleeting intimacy that forms between travelers. "I was happy to
be here," he writes in the Netherlands, "in the autumn of my drug-taking
years, with my soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend, Dazed . . . and my old friend
Amsterdam Dave, whom I had met only the night before."

Soon after their mushroom trip, Dazed sinks into depression, Dave (whose
mantra is "Everything in moderation. Even moderation") goes "completely to
pieces" and so, in a way, do Dyer and his book. His travels conclude with a
dejected visit to another ruin -- modern-day Detroit -- and a karmic
pilgrimage to Nevada's Black Rock Desert that I frankly couldn't follow.
Dyer deflates himself, and all he sees, so successfully in this book that
it becomes hard to take his spiritual questing seriously, or even to be
sure if the reader is meant to.

A travelogue as candid as Dyer's -- he tells us not only about his drug
intake but about his ejaculations, urinations and chlamydia -- also risks
trespassing too much on the reader, like a family member whose toothy mug
obstructs every photographed wonder of the world.

Dyer generally proves a very agreeable guide, and his best dispatches read
like postcards from the cleverest of friends.

He succinctly sketches Rome's "gladiatorial traffic"; a Midwest sky "at
ease with hugeness, a sky that looked like it had already been round the
world a couple of times"; and the experience, familiar to every third-world
traveler, of fending off an unwanted product "either because it is utterly
useless, or because although it is utterly useless you have six of it already."

But the lack of sustained plot or characterization puts as heavy a burden
on Dyer's prose as sunsets do on sightseers. At times, he tries too hard to
dazzle, particularly in his dialogue.

Dyer's conversations read like repartee recollected in tranquillity:
precisely rendered quips and rejoinders, sprinkled with knowing asides to
Baudelaire and Rilke. Perhaps that's how Dyer really talked to a girlfriend
in a rice paddy years ago, or while playing catch with a German beside a
Balinese waterfall.

But I rather doubt he recorded their witticisms so precisely at the time,
particularly given the quantity of drugs consumed.

Then again, it doesn't really matter.

In a Dave Eggers-esque disclaimer, Dyer states at the start: "This book is
a ripped, by no means reliable map of some of the landscapes that make up a
particular phase of my life. . . . Everything in this book really happened,
but some of the things that happened only happened in my head." Whether or
not they happened as Dyer describes, his meanderings -- and his head --
make for a wonderfully rich country to wander around.

Tony Horwitz's most recent book is "Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where
Captain Cook Has Gone Before."