Stewart Lee Allen: The Devil's Cup - Coffee, The Driving Force in History

Canongate Books

$39.95

Review: Laura Kroetsch*

I hate the expression gonzo journalism, but acknowledge that for some writers the term is simply apt.

Stewart Lee Allen is one of those writers, and his poison is coffee. The Devil's Cup: Coffee, The Driving Force in History is, as a consequence, a chronicle of his obsession with the drink set around a journey to and from its birthplace.

The story is an exhilarating journey that begins en route to Ethiopia and Allen's attempts to follow coffee's route to Yemen and on to Europe and the Americas. It's part travelogue and part social history, and Allen manages to negotiate leaky boats, sandstorms, helpful Buddhists and one pretty charming art smuggler. He gets to meet a witchdoctor and a couple of friendly Southern cops.

On top of it all (and fairly incredibly), he has actually worked with the poor in Calcutta - where he meets his art smuggler mate and begins to get interested in the demon bean.

Allen is a coffee junkie who manages to drink his way through all of his adventures. He drinks brewed leaves, sticks and on one occasion ingests caffeine as pure powder. He careers across America in search of the bottomless cup and discovers that in America you can get a truly wretched cup of coffee.

What makes Allen's adventures interesting is that through them all he remains genuinely curious about coffee as culture, history and religious practice.

In Africa he seeks out the dervishes and manages to watch their once illegal spinning. He finds, almost by accident, Rimbaud's house and acknowledges the tyranny of the West and the consequences of the coffee trade.

He travels to South America, as did countless African slaves, and visits the plantations where coffee made white men's fortunes.

By the time Allen gets to Europe he has fleshed out the argument referred to in the subtitle.

Namely that as coffee (and chocolate and tea) replace alcohol (namely beer), Europe literally wakes up. The result is a wave of frenetic activity including wars, revolutions and the eventual triumph of capitalism.

He may not be the first person to suggest that caffeine has had a profound effect on the Western world, but he certainly says it with conviction. That he is entertaining and manic and filled with his own sense of adventure makes for a very good, if occasionally hard to believe, read.

* Laura Kroetsch is a Wellington reviewer.