Hindu crush
• ANTHONY BURGESS
My dear old Tony, Read any good books lately, as they say? I've been positively devouring old Chris's new novel, and I think you'd make like fury with the old choppers yourself if you got hold of it! It's very much our sort of thing, being written in the form of nice chatty letters with not much of this show-off literary guff—you. ,know what I mean—though now and again you do get a bit of the old introspection, as well as (wow!) some quite hot passionate declarations of love from one man to another. :Now that's not our sort of thing at all, is it? We just take things for granted, but this character Patrick doesn't, oh no. Fair burns up the sheets, ducky. Paper I mean, ha ha!
Seriously though, what it's all about is this: this Patrick is married with kids (he just loves being a dad), but he's given the other way too, and he can afford to indulge his little fancies, because he's a quite well-off publisher and is even involved in making a film and he gets around a bit—one minute in California and the next in Singapore and, before you can say Jack Robinson (very popular, that one. Wonder who he was!) he's in India to try and stop his brother from doing something he thinks rather naughty. Well, if you've read any of Chris's other stuff, the stuff he's done in America I mean, you can guess what that is. Oliver, that's the brother's name, is going to be a Hindu swami. Yes, my dear: yellow robe, bald head, begging, mystical contemplation, the lot.
Now this Patrick, and quite right too I'd say, doesn't want his dearly beloved kith and kin to give up the great big horrible world. Besides, what would mother say? Quite formid- able, that old one, you can tell. There's Patrick, an advertisement for success, and a very nice one too—all Hellenic and bronzed and doing his push-ups as perky as anything in the morn- ing, great gleaming choppers on him, charm- ing all these Hindu monks out of their skins practically. And, as you can guess, Oliver and Patrick are really closer together than you'd think. Well no, not that. After all, they are brothers and they do write the same sort of letter (you know, very long and full of chat and very neat bits of scenic description and so on). And they are both nice, but in different ways. And so we're not surprised, are we, to find that Oliver's great dead swami—the one that first showed him the light—is also going to look after Patrick, and Patrick, despite all the success and the fun and games, is really in a State of Grace, and you know what that is, so don't start going on about Monaco.
Well then, Oliver is turned into a real live monk, going round collecting dollops of tepid dahl in the folds of his robe, and he's given a new name that everybody's very coy about revealing, though it ends in -nanda. And Patrick camps around a bit, bowing down and kissing the dust off his brother's feet, and everybody sees what a good man he is, and he's going to give up this dear dear young friend he met in California—not because love is wrong or any- thing but because there's a smidgen too much of old Maya about this Strong Physical Passion and the like. So there we are.
A very nice little book I thought, and the letters are a nice bit of impersonation, and there's Oliver's diary as well to fill in the gaps. And, you know, very moral. It would make a very acceptable tract to advertise the Beauties of Hindu Contemplation. I remember there used to be stories like this one issued by the Catholic Truth Society, but of course that wasn't to turn anybody into a Hindu; just the opposite, really.
If old Chris had put a letter like this in his book it would have been much longer and, you know, better written. But, of course, Chris is a Great Artist, and that comes through quite a lot. Do get the book from the library some time. Look after yourself, you old curmudgeon. Sorry to have gone on like this about a piece of Literature, but I do get my occasional en- thusiasm, as you know!
Love from
Burgy.
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