The serpent and the rainbow Book

Wade Davis's renowned investigation into Haitian zombies has the benefit of featuring a hero who is fearless, rugged and insightful. It has the drawback that the hero is also the author, and so his presentation of himself as a latter-day Indiana Jones (an inevitable comparison that comes up in every review ever printed of this book; I will shamefacedly join the queue) is tinged with more than a little self-aggrandisement.

Still, if you can't find a Boswell to write this stuff about you, you might as well do the job yourself. Davis has lived a boy's-own kind of life, and this deep-dive into voodoo and Caribbean secret societies in the mid-1980s was ethnographic fieldwork in the grand old style - hours of poring over dusty books in university libraries interspersed with midnight rituals, mind-altering chemicals, and treks through the jungle, all in search of the secret behind zombification. 'It belongs here in Haiti,' cry the houngans, bokors, and other assorted sorcerers. 'It belongs in a museum,' snarls Wade, who, conceivably, has spent his life trying to make up for the extreme dullness of his name. 'Wade Davis' sounds like someone who should be managing a small accounts team in Omaha, not grinding human bonemeal to appease the Ancient Ones.

Nevertheless, it's an enticing objective that does much to give this book its driving narrative force. His findings can be found summarised in various places online, but I won't spoil the surprise here because following him on his quest is well worth the adventure. Suffice to point out that he refers to it as an 'ethnobotanic' story - he goes into Haiti with the hypothesis that some plant-based drug is involved, and on the whole he finds his basic assumptions reinforced.

Admirably, Davis makes some very specific claims here, and therefore opens himself up to widespread disagreement. Some botanists of the non-ethno variety have pooh-poohed his results, but they do not give Davis enough credit for his lengthy consideration of what psychedelic researchers call the 'set and setting' of Haitian vodou - the mindset and cultural assumptions that people bring to any drug-induced experiences. Still, it's probably fair to say that, if his theories have not yet been comprehensively debunked, that's only because they were never totally bunked in the first place. Personally, I find his explanation, inconclusive though it is, very convincing. Certainly there appear to be no better ideas beyond either 'zombies don't exist' or 'zombies are supernatural'.

Davis's occasional lapses into quasi-mystic lyricism do not do him any favours, however. One minute he'll be reeling off Latin names and calculating datura toxicity on the back of an envelope; the next, he'll come out with stuff like this:

Sometimes with my eyes closed, and the silence broken only by the odd bird, I would hear whispered messages of the land that intuitively I understood, if only for a moment. Eventually I came to respect those moments, for the cycle of logical questions was getting me nowhere.

I imagine these passages got up the noses of any academics who were trying to assess the book on its scientific merits. Perhaps aware of this, Davis published a straight academic account of his investigation a few years later, called Passage of Darkness: The Ethnobiology of the Haitian Zombie. If you want just the facts, you might try that instead, but personally, I'd stick with this one. It's great fun, and chock-full of high-octane scholarship and intellectual as well as physical adventure. Fortune and glory, kid. Fortune and glory.