Around the world in an Eighties daze

Here's the premise of this elegant, trippy travelogue: Girl, 30, in last gasp of adolescent fervour, temporarily shrugs off glittering career in journalism to jaunt round world with hubby in tow in search of the ultimate E. Her hightail off into hedonism takes Decca Aitkenhead, Guardian and Evening Standard columnist, to the drug dives of Detroit, the warehouse clubs of San Francisco, the beaches of Thailand, the townships of South Africa, etc, etc, etc.

You have to admire Aitkenhead's courage, or perhaps recklessness, in admitting to a fondness for getting all pilled up. Hypocrisy comes easy to many journalists, particularly those as successful as Aitkenhead, and we should applaud her for her lack of it. For that, and for having the staying power to get utterly trolleyed weekend in, weekend out and still hold down a relationship and a high-profile job in the national press, much respect.

Decca Aitkenhead is also a very talented writer. There's a rare steadiness to her prose, a generosity too. Her sentences are spacious without being spartan, her paragraphs faultlessly clear and beautifully managed. Her pacing is strong and unhurried, her tone uniform and strikingly decent.

She paints an alluring picture of the golden club age of the late Eighties and early Nineties, a sweet era when the trivial not only seemed important but was important, when hardcore v speedcore and Doves v Disco Biscuits really did matter, when being a clubber felt like someone had given you a VIP ticket to the spirit of the times. It was a world of fast-flow nostalgia and incandescent beauty, where your fellow clubbers were your family and your dealer was your best friend, a world where a single pill could spark off a Pauline conversion into clubs, Es and 12-inch vinyl.

Aitkenhead's voice is the voice of the era. With a delightful lightness of touch, she captures one generation's heady and utopian selfinvolvement, while acknowledging that its attempt to create a prelapsarian state would always be compromised by its collective willingness to ignore the awkward fact that buying E is often buying into violent crime.

It's all pretty entertaining. The problem is that The Promised Land isn't really good enough for Decca Aitkenhead. Or rather, that Decca is better than her book. There have already been several rather good histories of house music, ecstasy and clubbing and The Promised Land has little to add to these. To clubbers, most of what Decca has to say will be familiar, however beautifully she says it. Her failure to include Ibiza and Goa on her journey will be a puzzle. (Would it be too cynical to point out that cheap round-the-world tickets don't stop at either place?) Above all, why would clubbers want to read her story when they can be out clubbing? To non-clubbers, contented stiffs and happy squares, The Promised Land can only seem irrelevant, not least because its author doesn't stop to question the grand futility of travelling round the world in order to get completely off her head.