The Nature of Things

Prayer of the Dragon by Eliot Pattison My rating: 2 of 5 stars "Omit needless words," wrote William Strunk Jr. in The Elements of Style . It is a dictum that Eliot Pattison could profit by following. He seems to suffer from diarrhea of the pen or word processor. Words pour forth in great profusion, often repetitively and to very little effect. The words do not really seem to advance the narrative or provide enlightenment. They simply occupy space on the page. One would think that Pattison is being paid by the word. Not only is he overly wordy but Pattison has certain writing tics that get under my skin. For example, the repetition of the descriptive phrase "the old Tibetan." This appears on practically every page of the book and sometimes more than once on the page. We get it. There are no young lamas, but find an alternative way of describing them, for Buddha's sake! What irritates me most about this series is that I really, REALLY want to like it. I keep pick...

Beautiful Ghosts by Eliot Pattison My rating: 3 of 5 stars By now the pattern of the plots of these Inspector Shan mysteries is well established. We've got the official from Beijing who is corrupt and criminal, who will stop at nothing to achieve his aims. We've got the Chinese official who is the good socialist, who initially appears to be an enemy of Inspector Shan, but in the end proves to be an honest ally. We have the misguided American who during the course of the book is converted to the wisdom and peace of Buddhism. And, of course, we have Shan, the former inspector from Beijing who lost everything when he ran afoul of a powerful figure in the Chinese government and was sent to a work camp in Tibet, which proved to be his spiritual salvation. And we have Tan, who in my opinion is one of the most interesting characters in these books. He was the official in charge of the work camp that Shan was assigned to and it was he who authorized Shan's unofficial release after...

Bone Mountain  is the third in Eliot Pattison's interesting series of thrillers/mysteries revolving about the central character of Shan, a former police inspector in Beijing who spent years in a Chinese prison because he refused to turn a blind eye to corruption in high places. Finding himself exiled to a work camp in Tibet which was otherwise peopled by Tibetan monks and lamas, he learned much from his fellow inmates and, when a Chinese official arranged for his unofficial release from prison, he made his way to those monks and lamas on the outside and cast his lot with them. In the first two books in this series, I felt rather lost in the narrative. It was only with this entry that I began to feel that I could follow what the writer was trying to do, as I began to understand a bit more of the Tibetan Buddhist philosophy.  At one point in the narrative, Lokesh, Shan's Tibetan lama friend and traveling companion, says that Tibetans like to walk for it keeps them connected to t...

While I was reading this book, the news broke of the 101st self-immolation of a Tibetan in Nepal since 2009. The self-immolaters are protesting the Chinese occupation of their homeland.  It was a sad reminder that, even though these books are fiction, they are based on very real events; namely, the sixty-year-long effort by China to subjugate Tibet and obliterate its culture and religion. Of course, for the traditional Tibetan, culture and religion are very much the same thing. Evidently, that is what the Chinese state finds so offensive. But, as this book makes clear, it is not just the Tibetans whose culture is under attack by the Chinese government. The other ethnic minorities in the western China borderlands suffer from the same efforts at repression. The Kazakhs, the Uighurs, and the Tadjiks, as well as the Tibetans have a sad history of interaction with the giant to their east. And all of these peoples play a part in the story told in this second book in the Inspector Shan se...

Shan Tao Yun is Han Chinese, at one time an inspector in Beijing. That was before he got in the way of a powerful Chinese official when he probed in some inconvenient dark corners.  Shan was then stripped of his rank, accused of "conspiracy," and unceremoniously shipped off to a Tibetan gulag, where he was put in a Tibetan work crew along with Buddhist lamas and priests whose gompa was destroyed by the Chinese invaders. We never do learn just what "conspiracy" Shan was supposed to be a part of. In the work gang - the 404th is its designation - Shan is accepted by the Buddhists and, over the course of three years, he learns to admire them and their philosophy. He begins to learn the ways of their belief system. He is able to perform some important services for his group, one of which is to get an old lama freed on Chairman Mao's birthday. This secures his fame among the Tibetans. Then one day, while his labor gang is working on a road up a mountainside, they disc...