"The man within my head" by Pico Iyer

This literary chimaera is part memoir, part travelogue and part literary biography (of Graham Greene). It jumps about from place to place, as Iyer himself wanders the world, becoming almost postmodern in its fragmentation. It is a picaresque (that's almost a pun!), the wandering narrative matching Iyer himself as he meanders around the world. 

This gives us the chance to envy Iyer's charmed life. Born to a father who educated himself out of Bombay to become a university lecturer, Iyer as a child commutes between California and top class boarding schools in England where he learns, inter alia, Latin and Ancient Greek. Following an Oxford degree he wanders the world, writing travel pieces and literary review. I was Greene with jealousy!

The discursive nature of the book also means that Greene's books are approached thematically, although the ordering of the themes seems random and is unhighlighted. And so, apart from kindling in me a desire to reread Greene's work, I felt unsatisfied. Post-positivist that I am, I would have liked a linear narrative, starting with the first book, so that I could have traced the development of Greene's craft. Instead we repeatedly revisit The Quiet American, clearly Iyer's favourite, and a very good book indeed. But. There is (so far as I can see) no mention of, for example, Brighton Rock. Perhaps Iyer has never been to Brighton. Other books unmentioned include A Gun for Sale. You might argue that these are lesser works but you can't really write about an author without mentioning the good as well as the bad.

I found the memoir interesting but I had a personal reason. I was at school with Pico, the "high" school whose name he isn't prepared to give, although he describes the place sufficiently so that it is easy to guess. For a man so prepared to tell us intimate details of his life this seems a strange coyness. Perhaps it is a strange game that he is playing with the reader, in keeping with the postmodern nature of this strange book.

Fragmentary and meandering: this is the structure of a dream. There are moments when this book becomes a reverie. There are magical incidents, episodes of violence and action, and Iyer is repeatedly haunted by the men within his head, both Graham Greene and his father. There are also moments when his writing achieves beauty and insight. A small selection of these include:

• “Lovers stretched out on the grass next to huge sepulchres, enjoying the one spot in the city where their whispers would not be drowned out by the role of passing buses.” (p 11) Is the ‘passing’ a bitterly morbid wordplay? Or just a pathetic fallacy?
• “Who are these figures who take residence inside our heads, to the point where we can feel them shivering inside us even when we want to ‘be ourselves’?" (p 21) 
• “The paradox of reading is that you draw closer, to some other creature’s voice within you than to the people who surround you (with their surfaces) every day.” (p 37)
• “A dentist is really a priest in a different kind of a white robe, administering suffering as a way, he assures us, of keeping deeper suffering at bay.” (p 41) He goes on to point out how often dentists appear in Greene's works.
• “The house had been built by a fundamentalist who are taken very seriously the biblical injunction to build his house ‘upon a rock’; he had found a large boulder up amidst the brush, and without benefit of foundation - or architectural experience - laid down a two-story structure.” (p 64) The sequel is that a storm ripped part of the house off the mountainside.
• “to achieve the impossible, one must attempt the absurd.” (p 65)
• “the new possibilities of our global order, and the way it allowed for multiple homes and multiple selves.” (p 135) Multiple homes and multiple selves seems to summarise the author himself as depicted in this book.

A remarkable and memorable book. December 2018; 238 pages