Customer Reviews

Water Touching Stone

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

After reading The Skull Mantra, I immediately began looking forward to reading Mr. Pattison's next book. As time passed, I became a bit worried he might not write another. After reading Water Touching Stone, I understand why there was such a long time between the two. This is definitely a thinking person's mystery, so much so that I will re-read it several months from now. Please, if you haven't read the Skull Mantra, read it before reading this book. There are too many connections between them. Shan returns again, the reluctant protagonist, called this time by the people who he has come to revere. The request: go find who is killing the children. There is a mind-boggling cast of characters that sometimes become difficult to keep straight, but none are no wasted. The mix of pain experienced by the different characters makes a striking contrast to both the beauty of the cultures and the author's description of the physical environment. Prosecutor Xu in particular comes across as terribly human in the final pages of this book. I must admit to wondering how the author could wrap this book up with any degree of neatness. He exceeded my expectations and left the perfect amount of ambiguity at the end. I highly recommend this book to anyone who appreciates a well-crafted mystery that both entertains and challenges the reader.

After reading The Skull Mantra by Eliot Pattison, I hoped he would write another quickly. Well, it took him a while, but it was worth the wait. In Water Touching Stone he returns to Tibet and Shan, his intrepid detective who is now out of the gulag, though undocumented and at risk of arrest outside the county where he was freed by the grateful Chief Prosecutor in The Skull Mantra.

In Water Touching Stone, Pattison takes Shan not only out of the gulag, but out of Tibet into Xianjiang, the westernmost province of China, a territory filled with ethnic minorities who the government is assiduously working to assimilate. Reflecting the "new market economy" reforms that are much touted in the West as excuses to trade with China, government oppression is replaced by corporate oppression, as the corporate licensed in this province gives khazachs shares in exchange for their herds and reassigns them to work units that effectively disperse clans, completely the eradication of old cultures under the benign cover of corporate privatization. The struggle of the people to retain their ethnic heritage is the background to this fascinating mystery.

A teacher of minority orphans is murdered and her students are being picked off one by one, killed by a "demon" who is eating children. Shan is dispatched by the lamas to save the children and find the murderer. He is accompanied by two lamas from Tibet. All three face immediate arrest and dispatch to the gulag if they are discovered. Along the way, they are assisted by the many people who are resisting assimilation. Khazach, Uighur, Elousi and Tibetan find common ground in resisting assimilation.

The mystery is complex and fair. The characters are multi-dimensional and authentic. Some may criticize the book for having too many characters who are too-fully realized since many people are more comfortable with keeping track of just a few folks. However, I appreciate it when a writer does justice to his characters by letting them achieve their own complexity and ambiguity and am frustrated by authors who develop only a few characters, leaving the rest to lie one-dimensionally flat on the page. I thought Shan was a bit slow to come to the realization of THE SECRET about why the children were being murdered...though THE SECRET is pretty amazing. Still, I began to suspect long before he did...though of course, he had more to distract him than I did, as he raced from one end of the frontier to the other.

I loved this book. In many ways, it was even more fascinating than The Skull Mantra though I anticipate that many will find it difficult. There are so many characters and so many sub-plots that this is not a book for lazy readers. This is also a book that demands re-reading, not only because of the complexity of plot, but for the richness of discovery and of place. Shan roams all over Xianjiang from one remarkable site to another in the ultimate road trip to sites that are indescribably wonderful. Reading this book, I yearned to see these hidden treasures of the world, buried cities, monasteries in mountains, sanctuaries in silos. There is an unearthly beauty in that part of the world and Pattison writes with lyrical tenderness about the geography and the people.

This book is heartbreaking, though how can a book about ethnic minorities in China not break your heart? Though Water Touching Stone has a "happy ending", it's the happy ending of survival in an oppressive society with full remembrance of those who were lost. This is a profoundly compassionate and moving book and I recommend it highly.

This book is truly a great book. The interesting setting and the unusual hero would be enough, but Pattison manages to take you on a ride through the current situation i Tibet, the mystique of the mountains and the wonderful people that live there. As the mystery unravels (slowly!), you actually feel the frustration of the hero, Chinese inspector Chan, as he has to battle with his loyalties and emotions.

The plot is satisfyingly complex, and requires both an attentive and reflecting reader if you are to keep on top of things. Pattison avoids the trap of delivering finished solutions and encourages the reader to think for himself - something that is quite uncommon for best-sellers these days.

The ending is both sad and beautiful and I actually felt my eyes become wet as I finished the book on the bus to work. When was the last time a paperback move you to tears? Keep up the good work, Pattison!

This book is thoroughly satisfying on many different levels; a rare thing in todays, pump them out, formula novels. There is mystery and intrigue. A chinese teacher is killed. Her orphan students, 9 and 10 year olds, are being murdered. A tibetan lama asks our hero, Shan, the protagonist of `Skull Mantra`, to investigate. There is the harsh cruelty of the chinese political programs designed to eradicate etnic ties and cultures of the nomad tribes in Xinjiang as they have done so devastatingly in Tibet. There is political intrigue between various factions in the governing bodies of the area. There are grand vistas with the stark beauty of the desert, the magnificent mountains and, last but definately not least, the sensitivity and gentleness of Tibetan buddhism which so touched Shans spirit and seeped into ours as well.
I did not find the cast of characters hard to follow. They were developed well enough to add to the rich texture of this book.
This is such a wonderful read that I would like to buy this book for each one of you. I very highly recommend it.

It took a while to get into this book, and not until after finishing did I begin to "get it". There are many characters, and not being a mystery devotee, I did not "figure it out" (I guess the book worked!) This book is about a part of the world that a lot of us "care about" but few have visited, or penetrated the local culture. Moving west from the locale of The Skull Mantra, Water Touching Stone is set mostly in far western Tibet and Xinjiang. For afficiandos of unreachable central Asia its a real treasure. As an aside, I wonder if the glimpses of cooperation between oppressed Tibetans and oppresed Mulsim minorities are real...or made up by the author?

There seem to be two plots: 1) will Shan and colleagues find the killer(s)? and 2) how will the spiritual lives of Shan, the other "good guys", and those wavering on the edge hold up? At times, the mystery theme seems less important than the religious one. After finishing the book, my central impression was a reminder/teaching of the first Noble Truth of Buddhist teaching...all life is suffering. I would encourage people to read this book and try to understand how Shan and the other characters persevere.

His revered teacher, the Lama Gendun summons Shan Tao Yun to ask the former Chinese prisoner to determine how a teacher of children Lau in the north died. Gendun also worries that someone is murdering the children from Lau's class. Though dangerous if caught by the People's Army outside the immediate area, Shan readily agrees to investigate the alleged homicide because he would do anything for Gendun.

The elderly Lokesh and Gendun surprisingly leave their mountain hermitage to accompany Shan. Along the way the different guides escort the Lama and his party until Gendun vanishes. Though worried about the Lama, Shan continues his trek. On every turn, Shan feels the hatred of the locals towards his own people and their destruction of the Ancient ways. Still, Shan risks his "isolated freedom" and his life to insure a child killer is stopped.

WATER TOUCHING STONE is a mystery, but is more than just a who-done-it. The story line focuses on life along the Himalayas, especially looking at the Communist China's impact on the Tibetan. This gives readers an insightful look at life in the area within an exciting adventure tale. The mystery is cleverly devised and in most novels would prove to be the dominant theme, but in Eliot Pattison's great story, the people are what make this another triumph for fans of the Edgar award-winning author (see THE SKULL MANTRA).

Harriet Klausner

An excellent follow up to The Skull Mantra. The interweaving of Tibetan Buddist philosophy, the history of the disparate ethnic groups that make up what today is Western China, Chinese politics and policies regarding these groups and, in particular, Tibet is fascinating and very well wrought. It's a very difficult book to put down and I can only hope for another installment soon.

This the second in a 6-book series set in Tibet and featuring a Han Chinese investigator sent to a hard labor camp for looking too closely into official corruption in Beijing. The story takes up a few months after Shan has been unofficially released (technically he is an escaped criminal) after 3 years, and the hidden lamas who have been sheltering and teaching him send him to an area just north of Tibet where a lama is missing, a teacher murdered, and several orphan boys living among the herding tribes are being hunted down and killed. It took only about 100 pages to figure out why the children are a target (one is a reincarnate lama), but that didn't detract from how interesting the story is, or the suspense over whether the specific child will survive.

As in the first installment, the focus is on the damage done by the Chinese invasion, especially to tribal and religious life: tribes and families broken up and forced to give up their herds and nomadic life; temples, monasteries and religious artwork destroyed; and lamas, nuns and other practitioners killed outright or tortured and enslaved in work camps. Those few allowed to continue as monks are licensed by the government, which is dedicated to squelching Tibetan identity or, failing that, to finding a way to use what remains to strengthen China's hold. Honestly, it's sickening, and now every time I see something "Made in China" I'm reminded that, in China, "made by" now includes anything made by Tibetans, whether by slave labor or by invasion survivors forced into this "people's" society. Read this only if you don't mind being outraged.

The author includes a glossary and a narrative bibliography for those who wish to followup on the factual background of the novel. One of the incidental subjects in the book is collectors dedicated to making up whole choruses of crickets which have different songs. The bibliography includes a book on this too, which is neat.

What a read! I've always been curious about life in Tibet/China, and reading WATER TOUCHING STONE was like a Ph.D - enlightening (learned so much about Buddhism) and entertaining (Inspector Yun has to work hard to solve this mystery) and educational (I was appalled by the way the Chinese treat the Tibetans). The descriptions of Tibet plus the well-developed characters involved in a fascinating plot made WTS not-put-down-able. Loved it & highly recommend it and all the recent Inspector Shan Tao Yun books.

Although this is a work of fiction, it gives the most intimate feeling for the sociology of minorities in territories administered by mainland China that I have seen. Better even than the tales the minorities themselves have brought out. Of course, as fiction, it is quite a story and a very good read.