The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 9 July 2009
by George Crane
If you've ever really listened to the Lynyrd Skynyrd song Freebird, or the Allman Brothers' Rambling Man, then you know the theme music going on behind this book. George Crane is an aging adventurer, a wanderer and self-proclaimed spiritual seeker. Whatever he proclaims himself to be, he is basically a self-absorbed man-child in search of various adventures and a basic freedom from responsibility couched in his claims of a Zen Buddhist philosophy of detachment. Crane authored a well-regarded travel memoir, Bones of the Master, in which he tells the tale of a trip to Mongolia with his Zen master Tsung Tsai. This book, which is broken up into related chapters, opens with Crane and his master discussing another trip back to Mongolia, to complete the task they had failed to finish before. Crane, who reminds us that memory and storytelling are mingled and mixed, had recently lost both of his parents and had a marriage that was falling apart. The idea of another journey to the other side of the planet appeals to him. It'll get him as far from his problems as is physically possible. The master, though, is typically vague about his own plans. He acknowledges Crane's eagerness and preaches detachment and a seeking of experience by allowing life and the world to guide the seeker.
Crane is a sponge to the master's water of ideas. But he is aging, too, probably in his sixties, and this openness, so eager and refreshing in the young, seems tired and somewhat pathetic in a man of advancing years. Not that we must abandon the dreams of our youth, but we must also grow and learn. Soon, Crane is taking off for the Florida Keys. His wife and daughter are just about fed up with his urge to wander and suggests he might not bother to return. Crane clings to this urge to experience everything, but there is little depth in his relationships with other people. He is a writer, a poet and a seeker. But when he talks about love of life, he is merely describing lust. Men like him leave a wide swath of hurt, angry, disappointed or just plain fed-up people. He feels heroic in his ability to live on almost nothing, while failing to acknowledge the burden he places on those who endure his wants and needs. Sure, in the book, he is self-deprecating. He sees something pathetic about himself. But he doesn't seem to want to do anything about it. He's too busy just having a good time, morose as he often is. He sails from Key Largo, through the fringes of a hurricane, and to Grenada. He flees family life again, heading alone to Mongolia with a long interlude in Paris. Once in Mongolia, there is no apparent goal for his journey. He heads off into the Gobi desert, vast and forbidding, with two women and a Mongolian man who expresses the kind of link to family and land to which Crane simply cannot relate. Crane knows this, but his long dwelling on freedom (from every possible human connection) becomes repetitive and fairly disingenuous. This guy can be a bit of a burden on the reader, just as he apparently was upon his wife. There is, of course, something to the Buddhist (Zen or otherwise) philosophy of non-attachment. Our attachments are the source of our suffering. But this philosophy has often been naively interpreted to justify simple avoidance of responsibility. That is not in the teachings. Crane probably knows that, but it's too much fun refusing to pay close attention. He's like a school kid on summer vacation. The journey is varied and mildly interesting, but the traveling companion is too full of himself to make the trip all that much fun.