Two Tibets--one of harsh reality, one of the imagination--make competing claims on the questing characters in this poetic, meditative novel. Alex, a scholar in Montreal, becomes obsessed with his great-great-uncle Edmund Candler, a London news correspondent who joined a British military expedition that murderously invaded Tibet from India in 1904 to prevent the Dalai Lama from joining forces with Russia. Through Candler's diary excerpts, interwoven with an account of Alex's research in London, we see how each member of the expedition projects his own hopes, fears and dreams onto the fabled city of Lhasa. A subplot involves a Tibetan monk who plots with Rasputin to win the Buddhist world for Tsar Nicholas II. Alex's conversations with an eccentric intellectual buddy, Milton, for whom the realm of imagination furnishes the only real life, effectively counterpoint the prescriptions of Tibetan religion and meditation. Frutkin ( Atmospheres Apollonaire ), a practicing Buddhist born in Cleveland and now living in Ottawa, has created a shimmering, fragmentary parable about the hazards of the aggressive pursuit of enlightenment, the West's efforts to dominate the East, and the difficulty of knowing others--and oneself.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
This first novel by a student of Tibetan Buddhism and a practicing Buddhist reveals his fascination with exotic Tibet. The novel is based upon the writings of Edmund Candler ( The Unveiling of Lhasa ), a British journalist who accompanied a force of British and Indian soldiers in 1904 on a mission to force the Dalai Lama to expel foreign agents so that the British could gain favorable trade terms. The narrator of the story is Alex, a great-nephew of Candler, who is researching Candler's work. Weaving back and forth through time, the story reveals the hold that Tibet came to exert over Candler and eventually upon Alex. Though the West was invading the East, the East remained inscrutable and, in some ways, inviolable. The writing is graceful if occasionally elliptical, but while the book is entertaining, it may have difficulty finding its audience.
- Dean James, Houston Acad. of Medicine/Texas Medical Ctr. Lib.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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