The Skull Mantra

Rating:
Summary: A good story, two sermons, and a smudged backdrop.
Review: The Skull Mantra
by Eliot Pattison
0712 6844 84
London, Century Random House Group, 2000

There are at least four important strands in this first thriller from an author active in another field. It needs to stand on its own. Success is in the mind of the individual reader. It kept me from some other important tasks, so it rates well. Most of the major players have some context beyond the story and stay consistent with that context. Those who eventually are identified as "good guys" are more credible and three dimensional throughout.

Two other strands I identified were "author's background agenda". One more was the physical back drop. I decided the author had started to write a tribute to the monastic civilisation that formerly ruled Tibet. Now the Chinese enforce a control that has long been asserted as a right. Pattison finds the remnants of the former civilisation enchanting. As reported they are certainly captivating. Beijing and apologists claim that the previous situation was a two tier society with considerable oppression. This outsider is partly persuaded by the author, but also feels compelled to suspend judgment. Pattison does give glimpses of the disadvantages of living in a society with an apparent caste structure.

The arrival of rule by Beijing was a wide ranging upheaval. Those imposing it could well be portrayed as villains. Pattison does not fall into the trap of making a blanket condemnation. The Chinese characters do in general live a couple of notches below the Tibetans on some moral scale. There are echoes of a parallel upheaval in the land that an unreconstructed Tibetan would call China. That upheaval is seen to aggravate the destruction in Tibet. Servants of a state that now treasures the tombs of their ancestors are portrayed as barbarous pirates. They loot where gold is to be found and they destroy where archaeology would call for careful preservation. The reader can probably handle this in balance, especially as the hero is still himself a victim of the flaws in Chinese rule at home.

Most of the book is about ideas and their rearrangement. The material world surrounding 'Lladrung County' is sketched as a sort of canvas back drop. This thread is the weakest link in the tale. The printed sketch map of the local area betrays an apparent impatience. One might conclude that Tibet is composed of rocky outcrops, all much alike. Before the story opens, it has been decreed that a road will be constructed. The map left me wondering both where to and why.

The persons involved do not interact credibly with the landscape. On the opening page one of them is found standing at the top of a five hundred foot cliff, with only the wind stopping him from falling. Not an exercise for anyone who expects gusty winds. For the story he needs to be there, to notice something on a ledge below. If there is another reason for him to be there, it is not explained. It seems implausible that road construction would be so near such a sheer drop with no obvious cause.

I felt that some editor should have looked carefully at all references in the book to the moon. On page 254, a bit after nightfall, the new moon is seen climbing in the Eastern sky. Not even in Tibet, please. Some days later (p375) there is a 'sliver of a moon' in the early morning sky. A full moon should have influenced the narrative action in between these days but rates no mention. A night or two before the new moon (p199) two people walk without lights from a parked truck up towards the work site by the cliff. It is just after midnight, and one of them looks back after thirty paces to see what the driver is doing at the unlit truck. I doubt that even people accustomed to
wandering at night with only stars for company would find the going or the seeing as easy as is implicit. That same editor should have questioned an event near the top of (p173) where the hero cleaned five stones, laid three in line, placed two on them and one on top.

There are other little details that jar. I don't really believe (see p229) that the Island of Hainan (Area ~ 13,000 sq m, Population ~ 3 million) has only a hundred miles of roads. Colonel Tan, who is an important protagonist, came to Tibet after 1985. A conspiracy of details says he has been there a couple of years at the outset of the story. Small pox is present in the Tibetan population in the tale but was announced as banished from the surface of the earth on 8th May 80.

I find it difficult to accept (p 360) that a vulture tamed by taking part in 'sky burial' rites would range widely in search of other flesh. It bothers imagination that such a bird would even consider picking up a beautifully articulated glove from a demon costume. Or, having picked it up, carry it any distance to a place where it would be found and recognised. I cannot imagine (p381) that anyone accustomed to heavy machinery would unthinkingly drive a bulldozer onto a recently constructed dyke, already holding back a considerable lake. Nor, once there, would they use it to search for a missing car by tearing that dyke apart. I can't imagine, as reported, 'turf' there for its tracks to work on.

On a scale of zero to 10, the book gets about 8 as a sympathetic report of what Tibet was once. It rates about 5 as a report of the Chinese as conquerors. The thriller story line runs to a 7. To visualise life in Tibetan surroundings, start with the archives of National Geographic. It is hard to go above a 3 for understanding of the physical world.

Prepared by

Donald Lang
...
15th July 2003

Rating:
Summary: Window to another world
Review: This is a mystery that transports you into another place, another culture, with a protagonist who has to be one of the loneliest, most thoughtful detectives in literature.

The mystery itself is good and solid; Pattison plays fair but is neither obvious nor overly simple. At the same time he also provides a primer about Tibet and Chinese politics. And he creates a central character who has a moral center that is both strong and believable.

The book provides an intriguing and grpping mystery, some understanding of a rarely-viewed culture, and meditations on the nature of freedom, faith, and purpose. A good, meaty, read.

Rating:
Summary: _The Skull Mantra_: A Complex Lotus of a Mystery
Review: This is an amazing first novel.

Through his central character, Chinese political deportee and Tibetan prison detainee Shan Tao Yun, Pattison presents a compelling murder mystery which begins with the discovery of a headless corpse and a gold cigarette lighter at the site of a on road-building project. Pattison constructs a rich depiction of the tragedgy of Tibet today, the clash of race, religion and culture which threatens to eradicate an entire people and thousands of years of history, tradition and human experience. Throughout the story there is shown a Buddhist awareness of the value of any single life and the ripples of its impact on everything around it.

Pattison doesn't short change the reader on character development. Through Shan's experience of each moment, the landscape of Tibet itself emerges from setting to a character in the story.

The pacing is excellent. With the revelation of each blossom in this flower of a mystery, Pattison never releases the sense of urgency, the awareness of hidden threat to each character. Everyone has something obvious and something hidden to lose. Every action of every other character puts someone else further at an unexpected risk. Often that risk determines whether someone lives one more day. No one is immune to the threat of ruin, disappearance, erasure. No one is what he or she seems, and I was pulled expertly away from presumptive character judgments about each one from one chapter to the next.

I learned a great deal about Chinese politics, Buddhism, favored nation development deals, without having to stop to think about learning while devouring the story. I've found myself researching more on Buddhism, recent Chinese political history, and the current events of business between the US and China from having read this mystery.

This complexity and depth, a revelation of new real-world information is what I think of when I want a great read in a mystery. The mental images the Skull Mantra evokes will haunted me long after the last page was been turned.

What a great movie this could become in the right caring hands. It could easily be as much of a classic film as _Smilla's Sense of Snow_ from the novel of the same name by Peter Hoeg.

If you don't want a shallow whodunnit, this book is for you!

Rating:
Summary: Heavy going, but generally rewarding
Review: This is an engrossing story, and the author does a splendid job of bringing the setting alive. His picture of Tibet under the Chinese administration is painful to read but unfortunately accurate, and, to his great credit, he avoids the temptation to depict all Chinese officials as Bad Guys; the occupation of Tibet is shown to be painful for the more conscientious Chinese too. I found that the characters were a mixed bag: Shan and his Chinese and Tibetan partners-in-investigation were fully rounded and believable, but some of the other characters (especially the two Americans) were one-dimensional. The novel was rough going at times, too: there are long stretches where what you're reading is fascinating, but it's hard to see the relevance of it to the investigation; and although the author offers a neat resolution of the mystery at the end, some of the other possible explanations he raised were never satisfactorily resolved. As for the criticism that the novel's depiction of Tibetan Buddhism is full of errors, I'm not an expert on the subject, although I do volunteer work for a Tibetan refugee relief organization and hang around with a lot of Tibetans. But I know that it's erroneous to view Tibetan Buddhism as a monolithic whole: there are various schools of thought and monastic traditions, and the indigenous Bon religion, which preceded Buddhism, is shamanistic and magical. Westerners are usually initiated into the monastic side of Tibetan Buddhism, but the magic often looms larger in ordinary people's lives, and I think the author did a good job of showing that. All in all, the novel is rewarding, but it's not the light escapist reading that one often expects from mysteries.

Rating:
Summary: Not what I had hoped for
Review: What a disappointment this novel was! It had absolutely no flow. It jerked from one segment to another, and the author seemed not to be able to tie these segments together smoothly. I was glad that I had already read quite a bit of nonfiction about Tibet because this story certainly didn't make clear exactly what is going on there.

Rating:
Summary: A book that will transport you to Tibet
Review: What Jospeh Kanon did in "Los Alamos," Eliot Pattison amazingly does for Tibet. He presents a closed, exotic society operating under excruciating, often destructive pressures and through endless telling details brings it to life. Over the years, I've read a lot about Tibet, from scholarly stuff to New Age drivel, but the culture remained stubbornly impervious. "The Skull Mantra" helped me to begin to understand. Furthermore, for errant Western Buddhists, the novel offers encouraging lessons through glimpses of people putting the ancient principles into practice under the most harrowing conditions.

Rating:
Summary: an awesome blend of Tibet's past & present!
Review: When a headless corpse is uncovered by a prison work gang on a windy Tibetan mountain, veteran Beijing police inspector Shan Tao Yin would seem the perfect man to solve the crime - except Shan himself has been a prisoner there for years. More at ease with his fellow Tibetan inmate monks than with the Chinese officials who run the work camp.

Eliot Pattison has taken us into the highest reaches of this world, into the rarified realm of petty, absolute bean-counter tyrants with pasts to hide & greed to satisfy. Mixed in with centuries-old rituals & stories, are modern day mischief & manipulations. Hidden tunnels & monasteries; helicopters & Chinese armed forces; faxes & demons & a lot about the influence of Communism as practiced by Chinese bureaucrats & Buddhism as practiced by Tibetan adepts. The more things change the more they stay the same! Amazing!

The story of how both Westerners & Chinese have incised the mystical, magical & spiritual from the Land of Snows is a sorry one. Crass shenanigans to placate tourists & callow genocide to rid the land of its holy men.

In the end The Skull Mantra is only a murder mystery, a mere novel yet it aroused my wonder, raised the hairs on the nape of my neck & deeply satisfied. Good stuff! You really should buy yourself a copy!

Rating:
Summary: A must-read for Hillerman Fans
Review: When I read the Booklist review a couple months ago, I knew this had the potential to be one of the more interesting books to be published this Summer. This book does for Buddhism and Tibetan culture what Tony Hillerman's books have done for Navajo and Hopi culture and mythology. I learned a tremendous amount while being intrigued and entertained. The plot is believable, the characters are quite real and the ending not easily determined in advance. Make no mistake, this isn't an easy read and you need to concentrate quite a lot at times to comprehend which characters are which, but it's well worth slogging through those points. Low violence, low profanity, very low sex and a cast of characters you really get involved with sums up this book. I don't know how Mr. Pattison could pull off a sequel, but he should definitely write more fiction.

Rating:
Summary: Imperfect, but with a perfect center, like all of life.
Review: When I started to read The Skull Mantra, I was not happy with the author's apparent lack of understanding of Tibetan Buddhism, which I practice. Just having Buddhists refer to their "soul" and having them kneel to pray made me cringe, and I hated to see Tibetan Buddhist practice reduced to reciting mantras. But after finishing the book in record time (the plot left me no other choice), I wonder whether the technical errors reflect ignorance so much as an attempt to allow uninitiated readers to relate to the feelings of the characters. Where it really counts, the book faithfully represents the deeper currents of Tibetan Buddhist thought. This is especially true in the conclusion, which starkly presents the way in which different cultural backgrounds find resolutions for the same problem (I'm trying not to give too much away here!). Yes, the foreign words and concepts make the book hard to read for those who are completely unfamiliar with the background. But if you want to read a great mystery that also introduces you to a culture worth knowing and an international conflict worth knowing about, this is it.

Rating:
Summary: ho-hum, but cool cultural stuff
Review: yeah, can't believe this won an Edgar. Must have been the "Free Tibet" vote on the committee. The book is good, not great, but good. The Tibet info is a lot of fun and very interesting, but the plot is somewhat bleh and the book drags. It really never grabs the reader. Not sure why so many have gushed about it, but it really is a middling plot, too many coincidences and somewhat unbelievable. Shan, the main character, is as bland as can be as well.