Copied over from the Western Buddhist Review
Maitreyabandhu, The Crumb Road, Bloodaxe: Tarset, 2013, £9.95 pback
Rijumati Wallis, Pilgrimage to Anywhere, O-Books: Winchester, 2011, £11.99 pback
Simon Okotie, Whatever Happened to Harold Absalon?, Salt: Cromer, 2012, £8.99 pback
There is a rich variety of talent in the Triratna Buddhist Order, nicely illustrated by these three very different kinds of books by Order members, all published over the last few years – one a volume of poems, one a travel memoir, the last an off-beat novel – with an admittedly tenuous transport-related link between them.
Maitreyabandhu is one of the few poets in the Order to have really succeeded on the contemporary poetry scene. His first collection, The Crumb Road, has had some glowing reviews and recommendations, and contains several prize winners. Maitreyabandhu, who lives and works at the London Buddhist Centre, trained first as an artist and has turned to poetry more recently. Something of his artistic background appears in some poems on Cézanne’s genius and peculiarity. Otherwise these poems are not painting-like but are beautiful, convincing glimpses of moments in the narrative of life.
Many poems explore childhood memories, including a long sequence called ‘Stephen’ about a first love affair. These poems have the flavour of coming to terms and of gratitude, and this is true even of the long sequence, in which love is like a pretty green weed in a disturbing, harsh landscape. Other poems move between recognisable experiences and fables, and although Buddhism never directly shows its face, qualities of presence and kindness run through the whole volume, as well as an attractive absence of the poet’s vanity or ego. Maitreyabandhu’s language stays mainly plain, his metaphors restrained, although some poems manage delicately effective rhymes. In this sense I like Maitreyabandhu’s explorations of the heritage of poetic form, while at the same time his poems themselves feel tremendously authentic in their themes.
In an essay in Poetry Review (101:3, autumn 2011), Maitreyabandhu defends a Romantic ideal of poetry as the expression of Imagination, that transcendent synthesising power. He begins this essay by describing how a poem of his called ‘Rangiatea’ manifested, with his tutor’s encouragement, through the madness and euphoria of creative imagination, and this long poem was my personal favourite of the collection. Beginning from an oblique reference to a Maori story of an island where ‘you could stay / and find the peace you wanted’, the poem shifts to telling an apparently unrelated story, though everything eventually converges at a higher, implied level. Maitreyabandhu has a gift for character and narrative as well as a pitch-perfect imagination, and I wonder if he might write a novel soon.
Contemporary poetry can often be difficult to access, perhaps partly because the gold has not yet been separated from the brass or soon-to-be-forgotten dross. The volume of poems by Maitreyabandhu, however, offers a lovely way in to the busy restaurant of contemporary verse.
Rijumati’s book Pilgrimage to Anywhere is a compelling travel memoir. A 42-year-old man, a longstanding member of the Triratna Buddhist Order, a capable and responsible director of a large Buddhist right-livelihood business, decides to throw everything in and embark on a round-the-world trip with no itinerary or goal, and the self-imposed rule of avoiding long-haul flights. He departs from Le Havre on a container ship bound for Colombo, and from this point as a reader I was hooked. Rijumati is a confident traveller, but also sensitive and intrigued by the people he meets, so his journey is an active and engaged encounter with the world. One the other hand, Rijumati is a spiritual pilgrim, travelling to find something, though he is not sure what, possibly only the experience of having to let go into the flow of what happens, and his open-hearted idealism takes him deeper into the travelling experience than a tourist would go. He ends up, for instance, making his way through Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Siberia, bumping through post-Soviet landscapes, just because… there is no reason, really, though he has his soul seared in the process.
His subsequent travels in Japan, the USA and Mexico are happier – he has come through – and Rijumati shows himself an intelligent traveller, enraptured by geology, sociology and history as he heads south. In Mexico he encounters ancient cultures he did not know about, and his Euro-centric assumptions are put into larger context. Rijumati’s journey ends with a fairy-tale romance in Cuba, representing an almost archetypal home-coming after the solitary journey; significantly enough he gives up his no-long-haul-flights rule for the sake of love.
There is something very inspiring, I find, about stories of renunciation and idealism, and Rijumati’s travel memoir draws the reader into a vividly remembered, well-paced narrative. The book could have done with some more editing, to take out the typos and remove the superfluous Prologue and Epilogue, but otherwise this is a great read, and a valuable contribution to the genre of Order Members’ spiritual memoirs (which includes, as well of course as Sangharakshita’s memoirs, Nagabodhi’s Jai Bhim, and Taranatha’s Steps to Happiness, both published by Windhorse).
Finally there is a first novel by Manjusiha, writing as Simon Okotie, curiously entitled, Whatever Happened to Harold Absalon? Manjusiha, also living in London, dedicates the novel to Maitreyabandhu, suggesting the circulation of encouragement in the arts of the imagination within the Triratna movement. But there could hardly be a greater contrast than that between the sincere lyric confessional mode of Maitreyabandhu’s poems and the post-narrative absurdity of Okotie’s writing. Nevertheless, Harold Absalon is in its own way even more of an imaginative achievement, and stands in a venerable lineage of fiction that simultaneously creates and then mocks its own illusions (I thought of The Master and Marguerita).
The plot, if that is the right word for it, is so thin that it hardly bears mentioning. A detective of some sort, clearly inept, is on the trail, as it is called, or as he calls it, of the wife of the Mayor’s transport advisor, Harold Absalon, who has disappeared. Or so he says. After the slightest of orientations in the narrative world to which the reader must assent, the narrative digresses along the byways of the detective’s thought processes, which could be characterised as intelligent, analytic, obsessive and quite obviously proliferative in the sense that one cannot help but think there is something going on beneath these thoughts, bearing some important yet unstated relationship to them, which if one were able to learn what that something was, would explain and in another sense destroy those interminable wanderings. It feels a bit like a comic version of W.G. Sebald’s intensely internalised narrations. And of course the narrative suspense, such as it is, of the novel is made precisely out of the gradual, though partial revelation of that hidden something.
On p.56 the detective gets on a Routemaster bus, and the remaining three-quarters of the novel take place thereupon. It is hard not to begin to remember, in vivid sensual detail, the feel of the top deck of a crowded old London bus, with its smells, its noise, its lurching progress, and its ambience of a damp box full of quiet longings and ill-hidden thoughts. This ambience comes to life in this novel, as the reader encounters the stream of consciousness of one peculiar character among recognisable types. The detective’s thoughts are mostly quite harmless, almost boyish, or at least boyish when they turn to sex, but attuned to the need for precision in language and concept, without which the world would be a worse place, and the reader is left to savour the peculiar new light that gets shed on words like ‘corner’ or ‘fear’, or on certain turns of phrase like ‘cliff-hanger’. And the detective, for all his proliferation, is a precise observer of mores, such as the etiquette around allowing one’s neighbour on the seat of a bus arise and leave.
It is probably evident that I enjoyed this novel. I enjoyed its language, its invitation to the reader to enter its world on its own terms, its pace and play; I enjoyed the gradual revealing of what might be going on, and the character of the protagonist, so absolutely at sea in his urban landscape, so determined to work it all out, on his own terms, with tremendous idealism and commitment. The novel does have a conclusion, which in its own way is both mysterious and satisfying, but I am not going to reveal anything about it. You’ll have to get on the bus.
A Blue Chasm 