Wearing, Alison. Honeymoon in purdah; an Iranian journey.

St. Martin's, Picador. 322p. map. c2000. 0-312-26344-9. $14.00. SA

Wearing and her gay friend Ian, with Canadian passport and fake marriage license in hand, traveled Iran for five months in 1995, almost 20 years after the Shah's departure and six years after the death of the Ayatollah Khomeini. Their purpose was to touch the people of the country. Wearing produced, from that experience, a series of personal essays that will be of great interest to students of the Middle East and women's studies, and to the ordinary reader who is curious about the people in a part of the world that has burst into our consciousness. She vividly characterizes a people who are generous and openhanded and who are devoted to family and to Islam.

Early in their tour, several women shop with Wearing to find the black scarf and manteau that will be her outer garments for the duration, and for the chador, heavier and all encompassing, which she must wear to sacred sites or on holy days. She finds that she must monitor and adjust these garments constantly to achieve the requisite covering, but they give her anonymity and a freedom that she would not have had otherwise. She and Ian endure debilitating heat, stay in cheap hotels, and are invited into homes where they eat the customary food, see children, and observe relationships. She visits with women who affirm their lives even as they know that others in the world have fewer limitations, and with men who are eager to tell how unsettling and abusive life was under the Shah and how life now, though poorer, is more righteous. She talks with unexpected persons: an Anglican priest in love with life, a young drug dealer who grew up in America, and a divorced German woman who must live in Iran or never see her children.

The author and Ian, and sometimes she alone, are taken on impromptu trips and spend days with people whose sense of time is agonizingly different from theirs. Always they are asked what they are doing there and what people in the west think of Iran. They find that what the average person "knows" about the west is how materialistic and decadent we are and that crime and moral decay are rampant.

A special delight in the book is Wearing's ability to reproduce the language she hears. Almost everywhere they go, Wearing and Ian find Iranians who have studied in the west, have studied English at school, or who have married a person from the U.S., from Mexico, or from Germany. Wearing has a strong sense of the history and politics of the area and notes, too often, the signs and chants that say "Death to America," even as many Iranians ask how they can go about emigrating to Canada, to the U.S., or to England.

Minor criticism: The reader is never told the date of the trip: after an offhand reference to a date, this reviewer had to look up Ayatollah Khomeini's death date and add six years. Also, the word purdah, used in the title, appears only once without definition. It means "a state of seclusion or concealment." The only character in the bock whose characterization is somewhat wooden is Ian. Stresses wear down their relationship, and they part at the end of the trip. His name, oddly, is missing from the acknowledgements paragraph at the end of the book. Edna M. Boardman, Minot, ND