Pico Iyer explores his obsession with Graham Greene
Aprofessional wanderer and observer, Pico Iyer — his thumbnail self- portrait: a “scruffy mongrel living in Japan” — has made a name with reams of far- flung journalism and thoughtful, intermittently surreal travelogues like Video Night in Kathmandu and The Global Soul. Despite locales both exotic ( Bolivia, Rapa Nui) and mundane ( Vancouver, Toronto), his latest book, The Man Within My Head, is inward- looking, a work less about exploring place than state of mind.
Situating the book within six categories, the U. S. Library of Congress data in Man’s opening pages indicates the complexity of Iyer’s project: three relate to the late English writer Graham Greene, two to family and one to travel. Foremost, then, Iyer is entranced here by Greene ( the life and the books) and he’s anxious to scrutinize this figure so haunting and yet inspiring.
In contrast to Norman Sherry’s massive ( 2,218- page) triple- decker biography or W. J. West’s feisty The Quest for Graham Greene, Iyer intends to muse idiosyncratically on facets of the famously worldly, unsettled and elusive author, all the while acknowledging the futility of pinning down the man’s traits (“if you push him into a compartment,” Iyer argues, “you’ll always get it a little wrong”). He likewise points out motifs in Greene’s fiction, from foreignness and dentists (“the most chilling image in daily life of the faceless administer of justice”) to the intermingling of farce and tragedy.
Spectral, an unchosen and unofficial alter ego, and a father figure of a sort ( whom Iyer never met), Greene is an influence Iyer plainly hopes to understand. Iyer explains that Greene offered him “a way of looking at things, and the way one looked became a kind of theology, a preparation for a way of acting,” and, more abstractly still, conveyed the knowledge that “there is a mystery, fundamental and unanswerable, in ourselves as in the world around us.”
Spliced to Iyer’s musings about Greene are vignettes of memoir, from the “very ordered universe” of Iyer’s English private school education in the 1960s to present- day global travels. Within this kaleidoscopic account of time and place, Iyer is struck by weird, ongoing coincidences; he dreams of Greene, meets people Greene knew and even attended the same elementary school in England as Greene’s son.
As for Iyer’s actual father, who grew up in the suburbs of Bombay and later became an Oxford don and a fashionable and celebrated philosophy professor in California, he remains, Iyer confides, “a mystery I could never solve.” His closed off and imposing personality floats through Iyer’s text, ghostlier in a sense than Greene.
What The Man Inside My Head makes clear is Greene’s centrality to Iyer. For the reader, however, Iyer’s account can be a struggle; subject matter that evidently mesmerizes him does not necessarily command our attention. The cerebral formality of Iyer’s writing is an odd choice for material so personal. And Iyer’s dabbling in literary criticism can be trivial or else puzzling ( e. g., “There was always a spiritual hunger in [ Somerset] Maugham that he made plausible and compact by the feline realism he never entirely let go of”). Lastly, Iyer’s own inability to explain his project — in Turkey he tells another author that he is writing “a counter-biography, as it were. ... I’m interested in the things that lived inside him. His terrors and obsessions. Not the life, as it were, but what it touched off in the rest of us” — perforates the text. Without personal investment in Greene and encountering such dispassionate emphasis on the fathoms of unknowability, readers may run out of reasons to stay engaged.