A Meeting by the River
by Christopher Isherwood
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Book Summary Information
Author: Christopher IsherwoodEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1999-11-01
ISBN: 0816633681
Number of pages: 160
Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press
Book Reviews of A Meeting by the River
Book Review: A reminder of why authors rarely attempt epistolary novels
Summary: 2 Stars
After he moved in 1939 to Los Angeles, where he met Swami Prabhavananda, Christopher Isherwood translated many Hindu texts, wrote a biography of Ramakrishna (a nineteenth-century Indian mystic), and increasingly incorporated his newly adapted religious beliefs into his fiction. Those beliefs are ever-present in "A Meeting by the River," in which the author depicts two British brothers who serve as alter egos for his own spiritual and sexual longings.
The story is simple and is established in the first few pages: living near the Ganges, Oliver writes to his brother, Patrick, and reveals that he intends to enter the Hindu monastery at which he has been studying. In Los Angeles for business, Patrick, whose wife Penny and their children live in London, departs immediately to India to see Oliver, find "out what kind of state he's in," and to prevent "this monstrously unnatural spectacle of a young Englishman being turned into a Hindu swami." Patrick, however, has a secret of his own: a lover, Tom, whom he left behind in Los Angeles.
Conceptually, it is a brave book, but its execution is appalling. The book is often excruciating to read, and it's difficult to believe that Isherwood wrote such a book only three years after "A Single Man," which is a tour de force of incisive prose and controlled diction. Stylistically, the novel alternates between Patrick's letters--to Tom, to Penny, to his mother--and Oliver's diary entries. The epistolary sections transcend informality into the realm of chattiness; they are freckled with conversation tidbits, pillow talk, and exclamation points. ("You deserve the best, and what the best is, from your point of view, only you can say! Do I deserve you? I would never dare to claim that. But if you say I do, then I'll be the last to contradict you!") The diary entries, by comparison, are respites amidst the prattle, but even their loquaciousness threaten to turn these oases into swamps.
What saves the book from being a total wreck are Isherwood's fascination with the atmosphere of the monastery and his post-Freudian portrayal of the two conflicted brothers. (The offstage character of Tom, on the other hand, is a somewhat embarrassing boy-toy fantasy whose presence seems rather pointless, while Penny and the mother serve as little more than recipients for Patrick's increasingly hysterical letters.) The book's ending, too, while altogether unsurprising, contains just enough ambiguity to allow it to be incongruously affecting. The last few pages offer a regretfully brief hint of what this novel could have been.
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