World of the weed

The Weekender

Sign up to our free weekly newsletter for exclusive competitions, offers and theatre ticket deals

I would like to be emailed about offers, event and updates from Evening Standard. Read our privacy notice.

Despite the voluble claims of such exciting petitioners as opium, crack, hash, grass etc., the word smoking, used without prefix or qualification, is still generally taken to signify the smoking of tobacco.

So although it makes atypically interesting nods in the direction of those other (mostly proscribed) drugs, this bewildering book's emphasis is on Nicotiana tabacum and N. rustica, on their migrations, rituals, solaces, dangers, squalor, glamour, representations, associations.

Tobacco has meant different things at different times and in different societies. This truism's multiple proofs are exhaustingly rehearsed in Smoke.


It is undoubtedly an engrossing, important and big subject, though surely not as big as WA Penn, author of The Soverane Herb, claimed just over over a century ago: "With probably the exception of religion there is no subject on which so much printer's ink has and paper has been expended as on tobacco and the practice of smoking." Really?

What of love, astronomy, travel, war, flora, drink? Still, Mr Penn's enthusiastic special pleading has proved infectious. Either that, or writing about the weed is as addictive as smoking it.

The editors appear to have trawled countless obscure transatlantic campuses and there to have found, puffing away outside faculty doors, clusters of single issue professors who really don't care if they also seriously damage their mental health by applying the risible nostrums and ugly prose of their trade to a fatuous scrutiny of hoardings, pipe bowls, films noirs, Punch articles, cigarette lighters, packaging, operettas.

Nor do they care if their readers' mental health is damaged by passive writing (aka reading).

There is an abandon about the unselfconscious way in which clapped-out verbal formulae (and the received ideas they represent) are dumped on page after page: " gendered", "contextualisation", "emblematises", " deconstruction", "normative", " paradigmatic" and so on, and on.

And once again we learn that white occidental men are racially bigoted sexists possessed of a fierce nostalgia for colonialism. Smoking and all that surrounds it are reduced to vehicles to which academe's mildly transgressiveand thoroughly conformist world view may be attached.

There is no subject which is immune to this treatment: swimming, marquetry, panel beating... Parody is rendered redundant when a writer - a flattering epithet - can pofacedly suppose that a cigar box label "encouraged a buyer to fantasise about mastering a docile black workforce".

The temptation to judge 19th-century mores by the hackneyed, paranoid shibboleths of today's gender and ethnicity studies is one which proves irresistible to this book's contributors. Which is not to imply that it is worthless, save as a guide to academe's degeneration.

On the contrary, the sedulous jackdaw can profitably scan even the most gauchely composed pages for unmediated facts (or "facts": a grande horizontale, for instance, was not a prostitute. Mistakes such as this inspire no more confidence than the blithe statements of the obvious and lame speculations that qualify them).

The study of smoking is an oblique means of scrutinising, inter alia: medicine's susceptibility to fashion; the bourgeoisie's dilute mimicry of bohemia; orientalism; the tiresomeness of decadent literature; the public's complicity with rather than manipulation by advertising; the contradiction explicit in taking pleasure in the consumption of something we call a cancer stick or coffin nail or nuit grave.

There is, too, an undeniable pleasure to be taken in Smoke's copious visual material.

The idea of combining papers which might have strayed from occluded learned journals with splendidlypresented paintings, illustrations and photographs is an odd one.

No picture researcher is credited. This is a job which has been admirably carried out. There is a real richness here, and a wit - of which the book is otherwise bereft.

Thankfully, certain paintings which are reproduced are not alluded to in the text. Such omissions allow the spectator for once to draw independent, neutral conclusions rather than be buttonholed by a hectoring polysyllabicist.

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in