Ever Greene

Publisher :Hamish Hamilton

Pages: 239

Price: Rs 499

The Man Within My Head does not welcome facile classification. It is non-fiction,we know,but beyond that,its fluidity allows the narrative to be many things at once: a reader’s memoir,a meditation on fathers and sons,a travelogue of the inner world.

The ostensible subject matter of Pico Iyer’s latest book is his longtime obsession with the work and life of Graham Greene,in which he takes up the central themes and motifs of Greene’s novels and stories. In writing about Greene’s preoccupation with the vantage point of the outsider,the perils of moralism and innocence,the impossibility of belief,the tortures of doubt and so on,Iyer,however,opens his memoir into an intensely personal quest to know the making of his own mind,as well as his father’s mysterious place within that making.

Early on in the narrative,Iyer sets up his constellation of figures and concerns for us,at first against the stark,elemental landscape of Bolivia. He is writing,he reads what he has written and notices how he has unknowingly embodied Greene through his work,then remembers how,just that morning,he has unwittingly replicated his father’s own responses. Unsure of why this should happen,he asks the central question of his book: “Was it only through another that I could begin to get at myself?”

The exploration that follows travels across space and time,so that we find ourselves in Bolivia,Mexico,England,California,a monastery,a boarding school,hospitals and homes,among gatherings of the faithful,amidst civil war,in Ethiopia and Sri Lanka,Bhutan and Varanasi,then back again to Bolivia. It is an account that at times resembles a dream,ordered by the random logic of chance association,with proliferating examples of unknowable repetitions and hauntings whose significance eludes their author even as he articulates them.

Although the narrative displays a diaristic indifference to the implied reader,this dreamscape is not arbitrary. The sense of contingency in the sequencing of events and anecdotes brings to life all travellers’ yarns,after all: we shift from one place to another,one memory to another,as a detail here or an experience there reminds Iyer “suddenly”,“eerily” of a moment and place. It is a considered decision to leave these connections mysterious,to ask questions without answering them,so that his reader can enter into the quest as an invisible fellow traveller,reaching to find out what the significance of such connections and epiphanies might be.

The intense invocation of the mysterious and the surreal — of serendipity and spirit possession,even — in Iyer’s personal journey is in dialogue,throughout,with a highly analytical discussion of Greene’s work and times. What draws him to the writer is his role as the “patron saint of the foreigner alone,drifting between certainties”. Indeed,Iyer could be defining his own mission when he writes that,for Greene,“foreign places and their people are mostly backdrops for a much more personal,exacting enquiry into states of being — goodness,peace,involvement — he longed for but could never quite find.” Despite the powerful pull of identification and empathy,however,Iyer is intimate rather than hagiographic; he writes with some disgust about the xenophobia and loathing that imbue Greene’s account of travels in Mexico,which is then strangely transmuted into pure compassion in The Power and the Glory,his novel based on those travels.

The reader who comes to this book,compelled by a love of Graham Greene,will find insightful readings here,particularly of The Quiet American. Iyer writes evocatively on the twinning of farce and tragedy in Greene’s work as one manifestation of the writer’s own bipolarity. His meditations on the interplay of faith and doubt in Greene’s work open into a profound personal investigation on the centrality of “innocence and its loss” in his own writing,relationships and life. His fascination with the older author is at times disquieting,as when he effortlessly segues from discussions of his own beloved,Hiroko,to Greene’s descriptions of Phuong in The Quiet American: both presented as matter-of-fact,empathic counterparts,both uncritically in the tradition of the Oriental woman who provides salve,if not salvation. Iyer’s work here,like Greene’s,is set in a largely masculine world.

Towards the end of the book,Iyer somewhat addresses the open questions he has raised through the account — always elliptically,never through something quite as graceless and blunt as an answer. He writes about the difference between Greene,drab and riddled with doubt,and his father,a brilliant idealist and believer. Through his own reflections on belief and mystery,we can see that while both progenitors have formed his approach to the largest questions of life,the pull of his father is more magnetic. The deaths of both men are placed close together,and towards the end of the narrative,we are told why it is that though Raghavan Iyer seems the more luminous figure,Graham Greene has the last word: “an adopted father can never die… that’s one of the great advantages he has over a real one.”

One of the scenes that repeats throughout this narrative is of Iyer writing furiously,the words tumbling out,even though the content of those letters,or meditations,or stories is usually kept tantalisingly out of reach. It is fitting that,around his father’s death,he is able to reach him through those words,much as this graceful narrative works to illuminate his relationship with his father,“a mystery I could never solve”. Both fathers,the one who gave him life as well as the one who wrote him into being,have a profound,formative presence in Iyer’s mind. The richest reward of this book is that it is a memoir in the deepest and most personal sense of the word,an account of the writer’s becoming so that ultimately,The Man Within My Head is Iyer himself.