The Lady and the Monk (Pico Iyer, 1991)

ISBN 0-679-73834-7

Plodding and tedious. A pretentious stream of consciousness (transcribed from a diary?) with no message worth hearing. Patronising soliloquies profess to ‘explain’ Japan...

‘There was, in fact, a prescribed look, a kind of uniform, for every stage. So although the old cliché about all Japanese looking alike was clearly absurd, there was some truth in saying that all Japanese of a certain position or age – all nine-year-old schoolgirls, say, or forty-five-year-old executives – were encouraged to look, or at least dress, alike by a society that wanted them to conform to an anonymous model, to become generic in a sense. A sense of interchangeable identity not only helped to enforce unity; it also made one parent’s daughter seem almost like another’s, and thus enforced a larger sense of duty.’ – p. 101

But it wasn’t Iyer’s arrogance that got to me in the end; my reading of this book finally ground to a halt on page 105, mired down in the midst of this load of tacky drivel:

‘In the pretty pun of C.S. Lewis, they had been "surprised by joy."

‘Increasingly, then, as I went on reading Singer, I began to see that the great power of this closet pantheist was, quite literally, to build a rainbow bridge between heaven and earth. Again and again, his robust tales turned around men who wished to renounce the world in favour of some unearthly, abstract love – a devotion to scholarship, or even God – and then, of a sudden, found themselves confronted with the presence of something less lofty that seemed to betray a higher source; again and again, his people were divided, their eyes on the heavens and their hands on earth. And invariably, Singer resolved the issue by showing that earthly love could be just the manifestation of heavenly love; that it revealed to us a radiance and a beauty that were otherwise concealed; that this was all we could know of heaven here on earth, and all we would need to know. "The more we know of particular things," Spinoza had written, "the more we know of God." – pp. 104 to 105

Pass me the vom bucket. Enough said.

Recommendation: Only for those with a strong stomach for long-winded pretence.

Look and Feel: My edition is the usual matt-finish paperback.

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