Product Description

"Utopian Dreams" offers one writer's attempt to retreat from the 'real world' - which is making him emptier and angrier by the day - and seek out the alternatives to modern manners and morality. Instead of cynicism, loneliness and depression, is it possible to be idealistic, to find belonging and companionship with others who share your sadness, or even, perhaps, your happiness? With his wife and baby in tow, Jones spends a year with spritualists, time-travellers, reformed drug addicts and Quakers, producing a fascinating exploration of the meaning of community.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #40053 in Books
• Published on: 2008-02-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Review
"'Probes our modern dissatisfactions with an exemplary intelligence...very much a book for our time.' Independent"

Sunday Telegraph
'Densely argued, well written, witty, repaying much thought.'

Daily Telegraph
'An unconventional travel narrative ... this is an idiosynctaic book; improvised yet thoughful, full of touching portraits.'

Customer Reviews

An unusual study
Tobias Jones with his family stayed in five different communities over a period of a year. He is dissatisfied with every day life, like most us of lead and seeks out the company of people who have aspired to be something different.
He certainly spreads his net widely, visiting communities in Italy and England. The communities reviewed include the new age community in Damanhur, the orphanage of Nomadelfia, a Quaker old age community, a cooperative in Palermo and a community for down and outs in Pilsdon.
All except the first, receive a favourable review. Far from these communities being a cop out, he sees them being very innovative as they have had to overcome a lot of resistance and perform a very good service to those in need.
The author finds a different type of Christianity, often muted, that is the wellspring of these initiatives. There are some interesting thoughts e.g. `liberty can't be the liberty to do whatever one wants. Its only when one has a life project, when one has made choices that settle with clarity the end you have in mind, that you're truly free.' Another saying is ` you often get cornered by people who introduce themselves as charismatic healers: for me, the best healing is simply manual labour.'
This book, with its unusual study of communities, deserves to be better read, not only for its in depth study of communities, but also for the deeply engrossing study of genuine Christianity, all too brief, that is its source. The book reaches a surprising conclusion.
I would have liked to have heard more of his wife's reactions to these communities to give the book a slightly richer flavour: this is my only quibble.

Interesting, but ...
Tobias Jones went looking for something. He wasn't entirely sure what it was, just that it would be different to the unsatisfying fast-paced modern lifestyle that he had been struggling with for some time.

So he went community hopping. He visited a range of different, reasonably self-contained 'communities', all with a common theme of separation from the 'normal' world, generally with religious roots to some extent, in Italy and the UK. He explores how communities in general are built, whether they work, and whether spirituality and/or religion are necessary for a successful community.

In the end his answer is probably "yes", communities need some sort of foundation based on shared beliefs or objectives. In addition, he made the remarkable discovery (for a metropolitan type) that hard manual work is good for the soul. Yep, it can be, so long as you don't have to do it for your entire life for a pittance. It's different if you've volunteered for it for a while before disappearing back to your comfy city home. To some extent that is all probably stating the blindingly obvious, but he has some interesting takes on the how and why.

There are some problems of course: he visited 5 different groups in the space of a year, which is probably not really enough time to fully dig down to the core and truly understand whether they work. Most of them have issues: the half-barmy, half-deeply cynical Damanhur in Italy swings from self-indulgence to completely spaced out pottiness. Nomadelfia, a catholic Italian village style group, is easier on the mind, but there are clear undercurrents of the worst sort of roman catholic insularity and intolerance.

The Quaker village near York is an oddity, as it is really just a very expensive retirement/care home facility, populated by well-heeled and often intellectual and activist over-sixties. I'm not sure it's relevant to anything much.

Pilsdon, an apparently genuinely open and caring place for people with real problems (rather than those suffering from self-indulgence, like some of the others) seemed to me to be the only one that really achieved, in a realistic and open but knowingly limited way, what it set out to do.

The accounts of the places themselves are interesting, and there are intriguing ideas and questions arising from how they work. One thing that struck me was that most of them (Pilsdon very much aside) achieved their separation from the 'real world' in a very artificial manner. They were either dependent on mundane commerce, or hand-outs from the church or wealthy trusts/benefactors. To some extent their other-worldliness is a fraud.

The main problems with the book are the author's wanderings into philosophy and musings on his own life-issues and the more general subject of community. Some of them are interesting; some of them, unfortunately, are utter piffle. Some of his more exotic flights of prose fancy don't actually make any sense, and he has a habit of building a theory or idea on firmly stated truths that he appears to have invented on the spot.

Overall, interesting, but the conclusions are not clear. Jones seems to have come away with a clearer mind (and a 1 mile radius exclusion zone round his house!) but there are hints of the same self-indulgence that afflicts some of the Damanhur types in particular.

Defining Communities
Clever, humble, well researched. Jones documents his stay in various communities over the space of a year. Though their motivations differ he finds common trends and shared goals that make him question his own place in society and just what he intends to achieve with his life. I found myself jotting down quotes or interesting ideas every other page and seriously fascinated with all the very different reasons for and expectations people had of what living with others would do for them. I think the community that caught my imagination most was the Quaker community of elderly folks set up by the Rowntrees. I found the idea of elderly people coming together to feel safe, involved and cared for was perhaps the most pragmatic discussed in the book and it sounded realistic and down to earth.

Jones has an ability to give a flavour of the communities, their participants and daily routines with flair and this makes the book one of my favourites of the year so far, however since he travelled for most of the time with his wife and child I would have liked to hear more of his wife's thoughts about the places they visited. For this reason a 10/10 is moved to a 8/10.