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Literary Review
The third presence
PRADEEP SEBASTIAN
APART from being the best contemporary love story I've read, Pico Iyer's Abandon belongs to the small, beautiful tradition of the mystical love story. Reading it, you are reminded of other stories about God amidst lovers. I thought of Shadowlands straightaway — the story of C.S. Lewis and his love, Joy Grisham (at one point in Abandon, when John is just getting to know Camilla, she tells him quite casually that she "once played the lead in a local production of "Shadowlands") — and of another little known, astonishing book called A Severe Mercy by Sheldon Vanauken: the story of Van and Davy, two American scholars sworn to true love, who, while studying at Oxford, meet C.S. Lewis and find their lives radiantly changed.
In both these stories, God is a very real third presence in the lives of the lovers, almost like a character. In Mr. Iyer's book, the mystical is passionately present in the Sufi poems and tales that mean so much to John and Camilla, the lovers in the book. The transcendent is also gently present in the California landscape that the lovers often trod. When they take those long rides in his car (sometimes in her battered car) into the mountains and the desert, you feel a sacred third presence, like some forlorn, sweet music, in the background. "The sky was on the edge of navy blue, and the stars seemed imminent... she followed him as he walked, and when they arrived back at the car there were stars in the branches above them. The road was close to pitch black, and it was easy to imagine that not a car had driven past in all the time they'd been walking. Their own car looked touchingly brave and resolute, alone under the tree full of stars."
In the mystical love story, human love is often an allegory for divine love, with the reverse being true as well — the metaphor of the Lover and the Beloved. And so, unfolding are always two love stories for the price of one. The way men and women come together here is mystical and mysterious, while the devotee's longing for her God is familiarly, tenderly, achingly human. Our love is a shadow of divine love, pointing to Love as a home or a city that we long for and are in exile from. (For C.S. Lewis this is to live in the shadowlands). Preparing for his seminar paper, John McMillan, the reclusive scholar-hero of Abandon, notes: "like all mystics, Sufis are singers of a homesickness that is a kind of hope; all of us are exiles in the world, they tell us, longing to get back to the place that is our rightful home." Elsewhere he writes, "The soul is an abandoned girl, lost in the wilderness, and crying out for the home that she has lost. The cry of the Sufi, is quite simply, the cry of abandoned love."
One of the difficult tasks that Mr. Iyer sets up for himself (and accomplishes brilliantly and movingly) is to write about Sufism in a way that will not sound like something from a New Age self help book or a quote from a greeting card (John wonders if Rumi has not supplanted Rilke and the Dalai Lama as the reigning king of greeting cards). In innumerable dazzling passages he is able to evoke, in sentence after beautiful sentence, the mystery at the heart of Sufism. "For the Sufi, man is not fallen", John continues to scribble in his paper, "just fallen asleep; we are not lost, just temporarily obscured. Like stars that can't be seen in mid-afternoon." Through the words of another character in the book — a more traditional Iranian Sufi scholar: "You do not come to the Sufi way... through your heart... You come to it through grief... in your tradition you speak of loving the one who is the cause of all your joy. In ours, we speak of loving the one who is the cause of all our sorrows. Our hearts are broken open, and then we know real loneliness. Our word for this is bala. Bala in our language means affliction. Bala also means `yes'. We say yes to affliction, and in affliction find our faith."
When John and Camilla fall in love, it feels like two people in exile returning home. They love each other in their solitude, in their loneliness. They are drawn by the other's sadness. What is so attractive about their romance is that so much of it is unspoken and silent. Neither will speak of the things that consume them. They are perhaps two of the most convincing, interesting lovers in contemporary fiction. It is amazing what Pico Iyer has pulled off here: as the lovers go deeper into each other, you feel the depths. The electrifying intimacy Mr. Iyer creates between them will put most other love stories to shame. You are taken so utterly into their experience, that one loses all distance. When John first meets Camilla he isn't even drawn to her. Her constant chattering feels like an intrusion on his usual silence. But it isn't long before he discovers that her chattering hides much. That her silence is deeper than his. More troubled but also more mysterious. Camilla slowly takes on such mystery that, along with John, the reader longs for her sudden appearance at his door at those unearthly hours she comes knocking — usually 3 a.m.
When these two lovers want to comfort one another, they tell each other Sufi tales; and when they want to celebrate, they don't go to a California beach resort — they head to a monastery. This passage is just after they've checked into the monastery: "Then her voice stopped, and he didn't pick up the thought. They sat, together and apart, on the rock, by the stream, the rooms in the distance. When it seemed time to go back, the little cell they entered was furnished with starlight and silence. Its two simple beds were pressed against opposite walls, and above each of them, on the wall, was a cross. A lectern sat by the window through which the stars, the desert came. A short typed list of rules asked for respect of solitude and silence."
Camilla has many secrets but there are two that will partly solve the riddle that is Camilla. John discovers the first one quite by chance in a newspaper obituary. That moment is a twist worthy of the best mystery thriller. The solution to the second riddle comes towards the end — a word game linked to the fugitive Sufi manuscript John has been pursuing — and the revelation here is one of the most satisfying, surprising and touching discoveries in recent fiction. Shadowlands and A Severe Mercy are tragic (they are about grief) in a way Abandon is not, though a kind of palpable sadness hangs over the book. Their love is so fragile, so wounded, you often find yourself holding your breath for them, praying that everything will be okay. No reader was gladder than I when the lovers make it, and their love comes shining through.
pradeepsebastian@hotmail.com
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