Beyond the House of the False Lama: Travels with Monks, Nomads, and Outlaws

After the tremendous impressions Crane left us with in his first book "Bones of the Master", on this offering we're left asking: "What happened George?" This book starts off in disappointment mode - yet, if you work with George as he tries to shake off the wreckage of his 3rd marriage; if you stick with him as he tries to shake off his accumulated neurosis and persistant self-flagellating; if you cut him some major slack as he goes through his "Rand McNally approach to self-discovery" (Thomas McGuane) - then, just maybe, the value of his story begins to emerge. Fleeing the disintegration of that 3rd marriage, Crane and a buddy end up crewing a boat off the Florida Keys - until the hurricane hits. Then he's like Forrest Gump and that other guy riding out that storm in the middle of the Caribbean. Surviving that, he goes to Paris where we endure his wound-licking and self-indulgent whining. And somehow towards the middle of the book, he makes it back to Mongolia, on a vaguely defined quest to find . . . what? It is clear that George is adrift without his monk-friend Tsang Tsai from the first book. This narrative may very well be written for fellow mid-lifers who are in either pre- or post- crisis modes: tough to say. Anyway, like "Journey to Ixtlan", this roller coaster (or perhaps a bronco ride) of a narrative is a metaphor for what is found in the search and the journey; the destination may yet be only a mirage. As a writer, George Crane is still working out his Mojo - like a burner on the stove, one gets the feeling that he's just turned down the heat. Although the leaping around in this book is formidible, if you perservere with the guy to the end, it is a pretty decent book. Extracts: A Field Guide for Iconoclasts

I see that some reviewers were not impressed with Crane's eagerly anticipated sequel. I must confess that I was! For one thing, the absence of Tsung-Tsai is not as glaring as some have suggested. His spirit is still very much with Crane; it's simply that Crane has, in some sense, moved on from being a disciple to becoming his own man. I, for one, think the title reflects this. Secondly, the prose in the sequel is far superior to that of the original. Is Crane self-indulgent? Of course! But that's the point! Crane, like a true Zen master, is detached from his own behaviour, and views it with an ironic sort of amusement. Above all, Crane's novel serves as an indictment of the holier-than-thou Buddhists and other saints who are incapable of simply appreciating life for what it is. And for that, we ought to be grateful.

George Crane spends a lot of time whining about the person he is not, rather than examining the person he is. Some interesting story telling, but the self-involvement frequently gets in the way.

While George Crane's first book "The Bones of the Master" was centered on his unique, funny and instructive relationship with the Mongolian expatriate monk Tsung Tsai, and for this reason assumed the shape of a disciple and master or to better put it a "buddy" book, this second work does not have a leading guide because we only briefly encounter Tsung Tsai at the beginning of the book. However, "Georgie" is always in search of buddies and so, leaving his routinary life in which things are not going so well, continues his encounters with rouges and border-line personalities. He travels to Key Largo, Paris and fatefully ends up in Mongolia, where fascinated by a name, that is actually a remote locality on the Winding Road (remember Owen Lattimore's The Desert Road to Turkistan), the House of the False Lama, he puts his heart in peace for what we know wont be long. I think he is now writing his third novel somewhere in Greece. This book is a delightful read but it deserves a cultural background to be fully appreciated and is written for middle age men and women. Only some points to reflect on: the Author's knowledge of Zen helps to put happenings and feelings in an ironic and off-hand perspective and many of his themes are very Zen indeed. The trip that is more important than the destination is one of the many subjects he dwells upon. The Zen culture is evident also in his poetry and style, that is choppy and lyrical at the same time. For those that remember Kant's "sublime", it is evident that Crane's deepest feelings and strongest emotions are awakened during a tempest or in the majestic scenario of the Gobi Desert and in these cases his poetic prose really reaches its best results. But indipendently of these peaks, the underlying thematic is his ageing and humanity in the sense of his unquenchable desire for women and love and the confort he gains from alcohol and smoke and drugs(?), like all people in this world. Naturally he is overindulgent with himself but in such a captivating way that we really feel he is a friend. I saw the previous reviewer focused his title on the False Lame, who is the False lama? Tsung Tsai that hasn't given the appropriate answers? The Author, that has no superior knowledge to convey? All the myths we live by? Or is just that place in that peculiar moment? A book to enjoy, to savour and appreciate with all our senses. Looking forward to number three !

It's not really until the last few pages of George Crane's Beyond the House of the False Lama that one begins to realize just what he has accomplished with this latest effort. And that the extraordinary regret that the book was nearly over would give way to the joy of reading it again and again. For Crane does not just journey to the Caribbean, Paris, Mongolia--(and particularly to the mountain range where legend says the wind is born)--but also to those intricate, exotic locales of the heart where love and poetry are birthed out of the pressure of guilt and the panic of life just beyond one's fingertips. Where other authors gun their literary engines to race through the plot, dragging the reader by either the ear or collar to a predictable ending, Crane not only lingers to smell the emotional flowers but he bids us bend down and examine the very ground and dig a bit into the roots. And what roots! His eye for detail and the connection between soil and art, caresses and relationship, is both unerring and instructive, especially when it comes to describing a chance encounters. Crane writes the way great photographers capture light, with a deft attention to detail and the meticulous framing of each moment, with a piece of the action traveling off the page, allowing the mind to follow, fill-in what is left unsaid, undescribed. The physical sensations and his emotional emanations reverberate throughout the book via his purling, susurrating prose that both delights the mind and invokes presence and participation. Just as in Bones of the Master, this new effort is the tale of a failed journey, and as such, it makes the book that much more accessible, that much more successful. For, like Crane, we are ultimately all False Lamas seeking our own inner truth.