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THE SKULL MANTRA by Eliot Pattison

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Reviewed by pdr lindsay-salmon

‘THE SKULL MANTRA’
by Eliot Pattison,
published by Minotaur Books,
Paperback of 416 pages,
ISBN-13: 978-0312385392
The 1st novel in a series of six.
Winner of the Edgar Award.

Eliot Pattison is a remarkable writer, one I have been recommending to readers’ groups, libraries, friends, family and my students. I came across his book, ‘The Skull Mantra’, by accident. A friend sent me a copy, and I cannot thank her enough. As an American published book I would not have seen it in most New Zealand bookshops, and I would have missed a reading experience which has had a profound effect on me.

There are few books these days which make such an impact on me as a reader. I have read and reviewed for so many years that it takes an exceptional novel to make me weep.  ‘The Skull Mantra’ did just that, and when I reread it to try and analyse Pattison’s skills as a writer I still find nuances I missed before. So what is so special about an Edgar winning mystery? Well, it is far more than a mystery. It really is a literary novel about a Chinese man finding his way in a new and difficult world, after a destructive and life changing episode which sweeps him from his home and work.

‘The Skull Mantra’ cannot be treated like an Agatha Christie mystery. It is not a quick and easy read. You cannot read it in one afternoon of trying to find out whodunit by looking for clues and red herrings. Its themes and characters are complex, definitely three dimensional and carry with them a reality which hurts. This novel, like those which follow in the series, was written by Pattison because he cares about his subject matter, writing with honesty, from the heart. When asked why he sets his novels in Tibet he said this: ‘I write about Tibet because there is no purer symbol on earth of the struggle of soulless bureaucracy and sterile global economic forces versus tradition, spirituality, and ethnic identity.’ He went on to add: ‘I write about Tibet to give those who do not have the opportunity to travel there to understand what it feels like to witness an armed policeman assault a praying monk.’

For those who do not know Tibet’s history, Communist China invaded Tibet in 1949. The consequences of this violent invasion have been, and still are, devastating for the Tibetan people, their religion, and traditional way of life. Pattison’s novels deal with the themes of cultural and religious destruction, government corruption, and living under a brutal foreign power whose political belief is ‘that political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.’ The joy of Tibet, in Eliot Pattison’s eyes, is that: ‘Tibet has shown us a new truth – for Tibetan resistance has proven the opposite.’

If all this sounds too serious and solemn for a novel, take heart, ‘The Skull Mantra’ is full of hope. Pattison is not an indignant, pro-Tibetan propagandist. He does not lash out at the Chinese and make them cardboard villains. He simply shows, through his characters, how the Chinese government is failing by using violence and brutality. His hero is not a Tibetan, resistance fighter full of hate and anti-Chinese propaganda. Pattison chooses to have Shan Toa Yun, a Chinese investigator for the government, as his hero. Shan has been disgraced, tortured, and sent to a labour camp in Tibet because he was too good at his job investigating corruption and wrong doing. Shan was investigating corruption by a senior party member, a man powerful enough in the government to have Shan removed and disgraced before Shan disgraced him.

‘The Skull Mantra’ opens with Shan, now a slave labourer in the People’s 404th Construction Brigade, working on a road site when the headless body of a recently murdered man is discovered. Most of the members of the 404th Brigade are monks, imprisoned for thirty or more years, ever since the Chinese first arrived. For the monks a murder requires certain religious ceremonies and they cannot work until the ceremonies are performed. The Chinese will not allow any religious activities. This means trouble, torture, executions and the death of more of these precious lama, Tibetan priests and monks. Shan wants to protect them. Not only did they save his life and sanity when he first arrived at the camp, they are also a special part of Tibet’s culture.

Colonel Tan, the chief administrator and overall boss of the region, has other ideas. Poor Shan is hauled out of the camp and driven to the colonel’s office. The colonel requires Shan to be an investigator again and discover who the body is and who killed him. If Shan can do this he can save the monks. Shan is reluctant to try. He cannot trust the colonel, he fears what will happen to the monks when he leaves the labour camp. In the end he has no choice, but he has Colonel Tan’s cooperation. Once Shan begins to unravel the mystery of the headless man he finds connections to other deaths, to the Tibetan resistance movement, to government corruption. Each time he seems to be nearing the truth another problem arises. In the end it is the lamas themselves who provide the final truth, but it is Shan who ties them all together. All the numerous subplots, and all those remarkable characters, are finally connected in a stunning ending. I would be very surprised if anyone guessed who the murderer was, and Shan’s denouement is more sorrowful than triumphant. The lamas have taught him to be a man of compassion.

‘The Skull Mantra’ requires intelligent reading. The use of Tibetan words and expressions, the setting, the vast difference in cultural behaviours, all need a thoughtful mind actively involved as one reads. The brutality, the casual use of torture, the shameful treatment of Tibetans does not make for pleasant reading. At times the reader has to walk away, but Shan and the lamas somehow rise above the cruelties and they are the characters who stay with the reader at the end of the book.

I cannot recommend this novel, and the others in the series, highly enough. Do read ‘The Skull Mantra’ and share it with everyone you know. Not only will you learn a great deal about Tibet, Communist China, and Tibetan monks, you will also, in your reactions, learn a lot about yourself.

pdr lindsay-salmon________________________________________________________________________

A PDR Lindsay Novel Review of ‘A Matter of Justice’ by Charles Todd

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ISBN: 978-0-06 -123359-3

Amazon BUY LINK: A Matter of Justice: An Inspector Ian Rutledge Mystery (Inspector Ian Rutledge Mysteries)

Charles Todd is an American mother and son writing team. Inspector Ian Rutledge is their Scotland Yard inspector who stars in a series of novels set in the 1920s. ‘A Matter of Justice’ is the latest novel in the series.

I always have reservations about American authors who claim to love England. England is the first error, it’s the United Kingdom, usually shortened to the UK, or Britain please. Saying England insults the Scots, Irish and Welsh who are part of the nation! Such authors say they visit frequently to see the places they write about. I sigh and expect all the usual errors, the characters speaking American English, with ‘gotten’ and ‘likely that’, ‘real good’ and ‘ten after two’ thrown in along with other Americanisms which, in reality, in Britain, the always well bred and educated Main Character would not say. Americans never wholly grasp the class system and the absolute horror with which a well educated gentleman would regard certain words, ‘gotten’ being one and ‘likely’ instead of probably being another.

However I hoped I wouldn’t find too many research howlers in this series. Mother and son have quite a following and the books are now available in the British Commonwealth. British readers are not kind to those foreigners who dare to write about ‘their’ country and make a muck up of it. Mercifully there were only a few basic errors, a muddle about British money being one of them. In the 1920s the pound sterling was not decimalised. 100 pennies did not a pound make. The boy asking for ten pence was a 2010 time traveller. Threepence or sixpence he might have asked for because there were coins for those amounts, a threepenny bit and a sixpence, but no coin for ten pennies, pennies not pence. And it is a strange amount to ask for in 1920. Giving him thrupence for bringing a message would be more appropriate, although running a message for the police used to be thought a duty to be done without reward.

The plot is ingenious. There are several threads, the Boer war episode twenty years earlier, the mysterious machinations of Mr. Evering on the Scilly isles in 1920, the shadow which events during the Boer War and the Great War cast over the characters, and of course the death of a wealthy financial advisor who turns out to have been universally hated.

Inspector Rutledge, as is the way of the main character in popular fiction, has a notable foible. His is the result of the Great War where he had to shoot one of his own soldiers. He has not reconciled himself to this and so is ‘haunted’ by the soldier, at times of stress he hears his voice. An interesting take on the more usual alcohol, racial or marriage problems of fictional police inspectors.

Perhaps in other novels Rutledge is more decisive, but here he is not, and I did wonder why he worked alone, without his own team, putting up with the obvious obstructions of the local inspector, Inspector Padgett, as he slowly unravels the history and then the murder. But the plot gallops along and the authors weave all the threads together so that the reader is left with a sense of the horrors past and present and yet to come, a fitting conclusion to the complex plot. On the whole ‘A Matter of Justice’ is a good historical murder mystery and yes, I would read others in the series.

pdr lindsay

The Children’s Book

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by A. S. Byatt

A Novel Review by Victoria Bennett,
author of Dot & Charlie
(A Comedy About Love, Sexism, and Infidelity)

Hardcover: 688 pages; Publisher: Knopf; 1 edition (October 6, 2009); Language: English; ISBN-10: 0307272095; ISBN-13: 978-0307272096; Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.1 x 2.1 inches

You can buy A. S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book at Amazon

The novel The Children’s Book, by British author A. S. Byatt, has as its title a misnomer—it is emphatically not a novel for children.  As with many of her books, it is voluminous and compendious at the same time, both long—the American hardback edition runs to 675 pages—and concise in terms of all it expresses and seeks to portray.  The book is not one for the faint-of-heart, either, when it comes to the matters it discusses.  Like Dickens in maintaining at length a fictional world which enchants, instructs, and sometimes terrifies, Byatt yet cannot be charged, as Dickens often has been (with a certain amount of justice) with being sentimental.  It is not an easy read, but it is a wondrous and compelling one.

The book is “about” the Wellwood family and their host of friends and acquaintances during the historical periods ranging from the late Victorian through Edwardian to Georgian (of George V), from the social optimism of the last of the Victorians to the great despair and anguish wrought across England and the Continent by the pain and struggle of the First World War, and the stirrings of fascism in the 1920′s.  The many Wellwood children and the other children as well whose lives are pictured in the vignettes of the progressive chapters are both the celebrities and the victims of well-intentioned parents such as Olive Wellwood, the main mother-figure, who is also a famous writer of fairy tales, a form very popular with children and adults alike during this time period.  But, as Olive, her husband Humphrey, and the other adult artistic, political, and social celebrities know perhaps subconsciously, and find for a fact in retrospect, children are not merely subjects for societal and artistic experiments, but growing people in their own right.

The Children’s Book is wonderfully personal and suspenseful in its appeal to the reader’s emotions, playing on both one’s hopes and fears for the characters with true mastery, and rewarding close attention to “the facts of the case” with a better understanding of how people work en masse as well as singly.  The reader threads her way through secondary subjects from bimetallism to socialism to women’s suffrage to Peter Pan to Victorian sexual habits to puppeteers.  Old secrets become new revelations and vice versa.  Sketches of real historical figures mingle with those of the fictional characters to add a strong dimension of verisimilitude, which in turn makes possible for the reader a “willing suspension of disbelief.”  As well, it provides a well-based notion of the sexual lives, loves, and mores of various types of historical characters, and replaces our all-too-frequent notion of the people of that era as only restrained and repressed with a good idea of what lay under the repressions and restrictions of the time.  In short, the novel is a world to live in, and its close leaves one both sad and anxious for the characters, who do not yet anticipate the advent of World War II.  Yet it remains a prize fiction as well, a moving kaleidoscope of images of beauty and terror.

To those faithful readers of Byatt who are familiar with her quartet of novels about a fictional 20th-century woman, Frederica Potter (The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, Babel Tower, and A Whistling Woman), this novel will appeal for its complexity of psychological insight into what helps build a person’s character.  To those who prefer Byatt at her mythical, magical best from such volumes of fairy tales as The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye and the fanciful stories from Elementals, the intermixture of fairy tale motifs with the modern twists and turns of the frame story in The Children’s Book will produce the same overall feeling of basic truth to psychic, yet storybook reality as her more thaumaturgically based novels do.  Alternately, it will suit those who prefer the Booker Prize-winning Byatt of the novel Possession (which combines fantastic features with fictional and period history and a generous dollop of academic satire) and the playful Byatt of the tale “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye” (a deliciously wayward combination of fantasy and academic satire from the book of the same title); these readers will find themselves at home here with her wit and sagacity.  Finally, to those to whom Byatt is a new experience, this book should have the ability to fix itself in memory as a genuine picture of the combined moral earnestness and passion of the late Victorians, and of the emotional distance with which their immediate descendants found it often necessary to greet their pet projects while engaging in pursuits and enthusiasms of their own.  This novel is developed and handled with a precision and lightness of touch that belie the intricacy and excellence of the picture presented, and should be a welcome addition to the library of anyone who likes to read and re-read a complex book.