Imperfect, but with a perfect center, like all of life.

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	• The Skull Mantra (Inspector Shan Tao Yun) Eliot Pattison St. Martin's Paperbacks, 2001 - 448 pages average customer review:based on 48 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

A book that will transport you to Tibet

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.

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Different

Excellent idea. Nice to have an intellegent story in a unique locale. The ending is wonderful. The hero is a kind of everyman reminiscent of Arkady Renko.

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Heavy going, but generally rewarding

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.

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Driven by Unseen Forces

Eliot Pattison's "The Skull Mantra" functions well on a multitude of levels. The plot is intricate, but tightly worked, so that the apparent loose threads are in time gathered up into a satisfying final knot. His characters, rather than being at all cardboardish, exist in a complex tension between the part they are called upon to play in the new socialist Tibet, and their private (and often agonized) personal motivations. While the plot is driven by worldly motives of ambition, power, fear and greed, the unseen spiritual world of Tantric reality is uneasily ever-present and exerting its subtle force upon the course of events. The book, in its depiction of the sufferings of the Tibetan people, is often quite gruelling. Yet we gradually become more and more aware of the parallel sufferings of their Han oppressors and the sense of loss which they too must labour under in the inhuman aftermath of The Great Helmsman's dream. This is a book to be savoured!

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Imperfect, but with a perfect center, like all of life.

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.

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reviews: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, page 8, 9, 10

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