Sixties seekers

Hippie

Paulo Coelho

Penguin, $37

Hippie is best-selling Brazilian author Paulo Coelho’s contribution to a small avalanche of books marking the 50th anniversary of 1968.

That momentous year, it will be remembered, followed on from 1967’s Summer of Love and saw, among other events, the Prague Spring, riots in Paris and Chicago, the murders of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, massacres at My Lai in Vietnam and Tlatelolco Plaza in Mexico City, a general strike in France, Black Power salutes on the Olympic medal podium, Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech, “Hey Jude”, “Street Fighting Man” and Janis Joplin’s “Piece of My Heart”.

In response, many young people, and some not so young, sought to flee the apparent death throes of Western middle-class orthodoxy and ride the famous Magic Bus, which, for a mere $70 a seat, would bump and grind the 9000 kilometres from Amsterdam to Kathmandu with a cargo of spiritual seekers on a journey fuelled by tantric pleasure, hashish and the lure of authentic spirituality and cheap psychedelics (which to some were the same thing). The young Coelho, already a student of esoteric mysticism, was one of those who took the trip (the pun is inevitable) and he has now assembled his notes into a “novel” (or “auto-fiction”, if we want to be more current) in which he features as a major character, though all other names have been changed.

Coelho has virtually owned the spiritual-quest genre since the 1980s with the best-selling , and his account of the. In a cynical age it can be refreshing to read a narrative which sets out to prove that “when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it”, and it’s comforting to know that the world’s wisdom traditions can be stripped of their inhibiting doctrines and savoured in small bites with no obligation to buy. Even so, $70 seems a little too cheap.