Not an epic disappointment, but certainly a disappointing epic. Chinese-Tibetan writer Alai, writing in Chinese, gives us the Tibetan Buddhist version of the Epic of King Gesar, a twelfth-century oral saga still sung all over Central Asia, with myriad versions in different languages and over a million verses gathered so far.
It may be the longest such epic in the world. So it’s fascinating source material that we were shamefully ignorant of, and there’s plenty for a writer to get their teeth into.
A novelization in a foreign language can’t help losing the oral beauty of the original verse, and Alai addresses this directly by including a modern strand with illiterate shepherd Jigmed finding himself blessed or cursed to suddenly become a grungkan, a traditional itinerant storyteller who can recite the full epic from memory.
There is interesting stuff here as his skills are seized upon by cultural organizations and he incurs the anger of a Buddhist lama. But it feels heavily allegorical rather than lived experience.
So what of the meat of the book, the story of Gesar and the mythical kingdom of Gling? Well it whetted our appetite to learn more, with demons, clashing kingdoms, irresistible consorts, indomitable warriors, fraternal betrayal, journeys to hell... the sheer amount of stuff in this single simplified version of the epic is incredible.
Yet we only get brushstrokes, an outline which fails to secure the imagination. The menu, not the meal. There are countless iterations of this kind of thing: “[The hawk] changed into a giant warrior, who picked up a hill and dropped it on the palace.” The what did what? Please elucidate, sir! But that’s all there is.
A lighter, wittier overview of the epic would have been wonderful. An attempt to novelize legend, with a tighter focus on a few famous episodes, could have been something special – the approach of Salman Rushdie in The Satanic Verses.
Of course, it’s not fair to complain that Alai didn’t write the book we wanted to read. The complaint is that this is neither fish nor fowl, and the result is unfortunately monotonous. We feel the missed opportunity most when the beauty of the original briefly glides out of the page: “When Brugmo sang, one man said he saw a mountain bend at the waist, while another said he felt the water in the river flow backwards.” Alai has the story, but he doesn’t have a novel.
0 User Comments