Eliot Pattison talks about Tibet

Eliot Pattison has set five crime novels in Tibet, a place unfortunately much in the news these days. The novels are much concerned with Chinese repression of Tibet and Tibetans, so it's no surprise that the BBC has sought him out for comment.

"I think we're at a very historic moment," Pattison says in an interview on the program The World. Though he does not mention the Beijing Olympics, he does say China increased its repression a year ago. He says the new campaign has included the destruction of religious statues, acts he compares to the Taliban's destruction of the colossal sixth-century Buddhas at Bamiyan in Afghanistan in 2001.

You can hear the complete interview here.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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Eliot Pattison's ultra-outsider detective

Outsider detective-fiction protagonists do not constitute the world's most exclusive club, but Eliot Pattison's Shan Tao Yun is more profoundly an outsider than most.

He's Han Chinese, but he lives and works in Tibet, where the Chinese are not universally loved, to state the case mildly. Not only has he lost his job as a police investigator in Beijing because he crossed Communist Party officials , but he has been exiled to a brutal labor camp in Tibet as punishment. In the first Inspector Shan novel, the Edgar-winning Skull Mantra, he is still a prisoner when officials reluctantly call on him for help to solve an urgent case. They are so far from anywhere that there is simply no other competent investigator to be found.

Shan's work on that case earns him an uneasy and unofficial freedom that he spends in a secret, illegal Buddhist monastery with monks he met while in prison. He continues in this semi-hidden, shadowy state in Prayer of the Dragon, the fifth in the series.

In this latest novel, he and the monks Gendun and Lokesh have been summoned to an isolated Tibetan village where Beijing's rule had not managed to penetrate thoroughly, but no matter; some of the village traditions are brutal enough on their own without Chinese help. "It was a strange gray place," Shan thinks, "in which the worst of both worlds was combined."

All this makes Shan Tao Yun more of an outsider than your average cop who's impatient with his boss. For one thing, Shan's outsider status is far more dangerous than that of most crime protagonists.

I'll stop now and let you go read the books yourselves. You'll find a list of them here. While you're on your way to the bookshop or library, ponder this question: Of all the outsider crime-fiction protagonists you know, who is the most outside, the most precarious, the most alienated? What makes him or her that way?

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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The Skull Mantra (and a question for readers about political commitment in crime novels)

Yesterday I finished Eliot Pattison's The Skull Mantra, a novel set amid Tibet's high, harsh, wind-buffeted peaks. Then I picked up where I'd left off in Peter Temple's Dead Point and found this:

"I went to bed with my book, Dying High: Lies About a Climber's Life, grabbed on my way out to get a taxi to the airport. There is something about the stupidity of climbing mountains that appeals. Perhaps it's the clinging by the fingertips to inhospitable surfaces. I could claim experience in this area."

A rather sharply contrasting attitude to mountains, is it not, and perhaps understandable from a flatlander like the Australian Temple.

Pattison's novel, winner of an Edgar award from the Mystery Writers of America for best first novel of 1999, has a location of unparalleled interest and exoticism (for many readers). But is has more. For one, it puts a highly unusual spin on the old motif of the unlikely detective pairing. The protagonist, Shan Tao Yun, works with a changing and uncertain roster of partners. Above and beyond the expected squabbles, there are deeper reasons for mutual mistrust and suspicion.

Shan is a Han Chinese official, disgraced and imprisoned at a work camp in Tibet, then given temporary freedom of a kind when officials need an experienced investigator to probe an official's killing. His shifting cast of overseers and helpers includes Chinese and Tibetans, officials and prisoners, uncertain hybrids of the two, monks and soldiers. The clashes of nationalities, politics and sympathies mean Shan can never be sure of his position, whether a given action will land him back in prison, whether Chinese officials are looking over his shoulder and conducting parallel investigations. And that tension pervades the novel from beginning to end.

Political and cultural rivalries are at work, naturally, not just between Chinese and Tibetans, but within both groups. Economic and scientific interests come into play as well, in the form of a Western mining company working against bureaucratic hurdles to meet a production deadline that, among other things, will let it have something to show a soon-to-arrive group of American tourists. All these clashing interests provide, among other things, a wealth of possible suspects.

But above all are the various faces of Tibetan Buddhism, the prayers, the demons, the all-sustaining faith of monks and lay people, the texts, the art, and a sympathetic view of outcast clans whose traditional job is to prepare bodies for "sky burial," all held together by Pattison's strong sympathy for Tibetans. If Clive James was right that most international crime novels, with no original stories to tell, "Essentially .. are guidebooks,” this is one hell of a guidebook.

And now, your question: The Skull Mantra fairly burns with awe for Tibet, its people and its ways, and with anger at China's treatment of all these since the invasion of 1959. How do you feel about strongly expressed opinions of this kind in crime stories?

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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