The Skull Mantra (Inspector Shan Tao Yun)

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!

I know nothing about Tibetan Buddhism and so cannot comment on how well or poorly Pattison does at portraying the beliefs and practices of that religion, but at the very least I believe he fully succeeded in creating a convincing portrait of a culture alien both to American readers and, to a great extent, to the book's Chinese protaganist, Shan Tao Yun, a former police investigator who is now a prisoner in the 404th Construction Brigade, condemned to work on a road gang in the mountains of Tibet because he proved too honest in Beijing. There is much in Shan which inevitably reminded me of Arkady Renko of Martin Cruz Smith's "Gorky Park" and sequels. Both Shan and Renko are driven to find the truth no matter how much their masters would prefer a more convenient solution to the crimes at hand. And Shan, like Renko before him, finds his quest for the truth becomes a path to his own moral growth. For me, the mystery, the setting, and the central characters all worked to make an absorbing tale that kept me interested to the last page.

Don't be put off by descriptions of the book's setting - prison camp, torture, etc. It's not a grim polemic against Chinese repression in Tibet. It is a wonderfully written story which you won't be able to put down once you get past the first chapter.

Like the Himalayan mountains that tower over the Tibetan valleys of "The Skull Mantra", this novel is miles above the rest of the crime fiction that crowd bookstores. Pattison's tale of the struggles of a group of Tibetan monks imprisoned in a communist Chinese labor camp is filled with wisdom, compassion and a moral order that is so often lacking in contemporary crime ficiton. There is so much that is fascinating in this novel: the convoluted, and ironically highly bureaucratic, politics of communist China; the dichotomy of a superstitious ancient Tibetan religion that coexists with the simplicity of a more modern Buddhism; the inner turmoil that many of the characters struggle with as they attempt to reconcile where their allegiance lies - with Tibet or China? So many American writers feel that to achieve a grittier sense of "reality" that their books need to spill blood by the gallon and that the characters need to be soulless decandent wastrels. Pattison gives us characters who want forgiveness for their violence and actually exhibit shame. But, I guess this may be in part due to the Asian culture that Pattison so excellently captures on the page. American culture is so unwilling to embrace shame, remorse and forgivenesss and I rarely find it in the mystery novels that are published these days.

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.