Embattled Truthseekers: the Persecuted Protagonist: Guest Post by Eliot Pattison

Character over plot is a mantra often heard in writing seminars, emphasizing the point that it is characters, not plot, that drive a novel‘s success. Ray Bradbury even suggested that “Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by.” Engaging novels require engaging characters, but the novelist uses plot to thrust tension onto those characters, developing them by besieging them. Plot should never be considered a gimmick or mere tool. The well-done plot and its backdrop become intrinsic, vital to the metamorphosis of character that lies at the heart of the tale. A plot’s unique tension may derive from micro, intimate dilemmas or range through macro social and ideological forces, driving vastly different takeaways for the reader. Orwell’s 1984 would have been a dramatically different novel if the protagonist Winston Smith had been suffering from being spurned by a lover instead of his resistance to a soulless totalitarian state. Few tension builders are as gripping as this dynamic of a character being persecuted by ruthless, omnipotent adversaries. 

I chose persecuted protagonists for both my fictional series. In the Skull Mantra novels my main character is a disgraced Beijing investigator exiled to Tibet who finds justice for oppressed Tibetans despite being battered by authorities whose job it is to destroy the Tibetan identity. In my Bone Rattler series the lead character is a Scottish doctor exiled to the American colonies for his connections with Jacobite rebels. Burdened by a forced servitude that denies him any rights, he resists his own bondage while seeking justice for native tribesmen, slaves and other orphaned people of the colonies. The ongoing persecution of these characters steadily increases the stakes as they stalk the trails of murderers. Corrupt judges, spiteful army officers, oppressive party commissars, vengeful tribal warriors, ruthless policemen, and sadistic aristocrats ambush these characters as they seek answers that those in power conceal. Importantly, the ordeals that shape them are not simply caused by barriers to their quest. They are targeted with dire personal jeopardy, often being arrested, even tortured, and must defy government to discover the truth. Adding to the tension is the recurring possibility, sometimes a direct suggestion, that the physical and mental cruelty they endure will sap their humanity. That omnipresent threat and the self-doubt it precipitates present new layers of stress, driving both plot and character. How, the novels ask, can these bludgeoned characters preserve their courage and integrity when faced with such suffering? As Nietzsche poignantly reminded us, “whoever battles with monsters had better see that it does not turn him into a monster.” These protagonists are constantly dancing with monsters. 

A less obvious but potentially profound aspect of the persecuted protagonist novel is the platform it provides for illuminating the persecution itself. Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is a well-known example, exposing the horrors of the Soviet gulag system while following a tormented protagonist who has been wrongly sentenced to forced labor. Stephen King’s novel Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption reveals penal system corruption as it tracks a wrongly accused prisoner who overcomes years of adversity inflicted by the authorities to find a makeshift resolution. Readers may be driven by empathy to join the protagonist’s journey but along the way they will learn much about the forces that cause the suffering. My own Skull Mantra series casts a spotlight on the abject human rights abuses underway in western China. No one picks up such a novel in search of a human rights chronicle, but the reader absorbs bitter lessons about those abuses by walking alongside my lead character. More than once I’ve had readers tell me that although they had previously read reports on human rights conditions in Tibet, they had never really understood that oppression until they read these novels. 

Mystery fiction lends itself well to such tales, for it can take the reader inside the head of the oppressed, a perspective seldom available in traditional factual reporting since most victims are silenced by their oppressors. These are the truths that are hard to come by—and often readers don’t otherwise know the questions to ask to reach those truths. Ultimately these characters cannot be separated from their persecution—and that is the real power of these books. The novels set the hook early by describing the protagonist’s suffering then pull their readers into deeper waters, prodding them to think about the human condition in unfamiliar ways. This is what Francis Bacon meant when he told us long ago that “Truth is hard to tell. It sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible.” The persecuted protagonist invites the reader to become a truthseeker. 

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Eliot Pattison’s nineteen novels include the award-winning Skull Mantra series and the Bone Rattler series, which explores the complex people and events leading to the founding of the United States. For more info, visit eliotpattison.com.

The Many Faces of Freedom: Guest Post by Eliot Pattison

In creating a series set in the years leading to the American Revolution, I inevitably wove themes of freedom into my plotlines. After seven novels set in the time period, however, I am less likely to offer a quick definition of freedom than when I started. From the broad view it is the paramount theme and driver behind most plots set in this era, but I have become well acquainted with the challenges of authentically translating the notion of freedom into the words and actions of a diverse range of characters. Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but freedom is in the beholder’s heart. It can be a worm gnawing at a character’s soul. It can be a near impossible destination in a desperate, tormented journey. It can manifest itself in a guilty conscience, a philosophical discourse, an angry harangue, a forlorn flight, or a prayer-like whisper. To some writers it might be a versatile tool. But for the novelist probing the remarkable years before the Revolution, capturing freedom is more like a duty, a challenge that if not met can render an entire novel ineffective. 

Freedom is a many faceted jewel. It is straightforward and easily explained if your characters are all breaking out of a prison as in Paul Brickhill’s classic The Great Escape. It is more difficult to articulate the goal for the protagonist seeking to flee a gilded cage as in Bronte’s Jane Eyre, whose flight is from her particular niche in society. It is the seemingly unattainable heaven as viewed from the hell of Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the life of Ivan Denisovich. It is the carefree open river in Huckleberry Finn. It is the ability to fend off the pressures of a conforming society to honor a religion in Chaim Potok’s The Chosen. 

Haunting tales have been crafted around the quest for a hidden refuge of freedom from an overbearing state, as in Huxley’s Brave New World or Orwell’s 1984. These novels offer a unitary vision of freedom, narrowed as it may be by soul-crushing dystopias. Not so with authentic treatments of early America. 

One of the reasons I am drawn to the 18th century is the richness of its cultures, characters, and events. Society was not nearly as homogenous as history texts would have us believe. Native Americans, Scottish rebels transported into servitude, hardscrabble farmers, Puritan clergy, slaves, persecuted Quakers, and wealthy merchants were living side by side though in sharply different circumstances. Just within Massachusetts, a primary venue of my new novel, the residents of Marblehead were different from those of Boston, and the thousands of troops occupying Boston —one for every four colonists-- were altogether different from either community. 

An apt analogy for the challenges of presenting all these identities is the famed Liberty Tree, a rallying point in 1770 Boston. The roots and trunk reflect freedom in its broadest liberating sense, but the tree had many limbs and branches, representing myriad pathways and contexts for freedom. My protagonist wants to eliminate the interference of the government from his life, including its bar to marriage, which is prohibited for indentured servants. The Sons of Liberty want the yoke of a remote, intolerant king thrown off but individually—as reflected in characters as diverse as Crispus Attucks and John Hancock-- have sharply different ideas of how to obtain that freedom. Petitioning the king is a far cry from wielding a club against oppressors encamped on Boston Common, but both are calls for freedom. 

Another limb of this figurative Liberty Tree is occupied by slaves, themselves reflecting an array of aspirations. Slaves who have escaped from brutal servitude on a Barbados sugar plantation have a more visceral perspective than those serving as clerks in Boston merchant houses. Those who have recently lost their chains begin to understand not just the complexities, but also the responsibilities, of freedom. “No man can give me my freedom,” declares a fugitive slave in my new novel, “I have to earn it.” Then there are the Native Americans, many of whom get confused with all the talk of freedom since freedom is in their DNA, an inalienable instinct of those bred in the wilds. The branches of the Liberty Tree may all sway in the same wind, but they can be dramatically different. Not to recognize those differences in an historical mystery would undermine its authenticity. 

The cause that drove the American Revolution was primarily political freedom, which itself reflected the birthing of the new American identity. The fierce self-reliance of the frontier settlers melded with the more philosophical perspectives of rebels versed in the Greek and Roman classics. Ultimately, they found one voice, declaring in a famed 1776 document that fundamental freedoms did not come from government and therefore the government had no authority to restrict them. That political solution didn’t satisfy everyone’s criteria, but it did help frame vital questions that shape characters then and now: how do you value freedom? Do you seek freedom from something or freedom to do something? A character’s outlook can also be a function of the particular repression they or loved ones have suffered, and the need to protect another’s freedom. Such variations in perspectives can affect character arcs, dialogue, and even the choice of adjectives. 

Freedom is a powerful motive for human conduct, fictional or otherwise, and understanding a character’s particular engagement in its complex landscape can become the key to solving a mystery. The unexplained death of a naval officer may look very different when it is discovered that he impressed local fishermen to serve as forced labor on a warship. The puzzling death of a wealthy merchant may take on a new meaning when it is discovered that he has been smuggling arms for the Sons of Liberty. 

The faces of freedom can thus be proud, vengeful, fearful, sternly defiant, or even fixed in feigned innocence, all of which are reflected in my novels. It can even, for one uniquely aware of secret, deadly plots by the king’s spies, be one of cunning subterfuge—as evidenced by my protagonist. This rich array of people and perspectives provides fertile ground for mysteries, and for deeper appreciation of the complex factors that created the American identity. 

Understanding the diverse faces of freedom through the medium of a mystery thus becomes a means for assimilating history. Mysteries are a potent vehicle for historical fiction, for they are so effective in drawing the reader into the thoughts, motives, and actions of their characters. Historical novels don’t chart history, they transport us inside it, so we know how history feels. These faces thus become familiar, more human, giving us an intimate grasp of what came before making it not simply the past, but our past. 

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Eliot Pattison’s just-released novel Freedom’s Ghost, is seventh in his acclaimed Bone Rattler series, which explores the tumultuous years leading to the American Revolution.

Described as "a writer of faraway mysteries," Eliot Pattison's travel and interests span a million miles of global trekking, visiting every continent but Antarctica. An international lawyer by training, he received “The Art of Freedom” award from the Tibet House for bringing his social and cultural concerns to his fiction, published on three continents. He is the author of seventeen mystery novels, including the internationally acclaimed Edgar award-winning Inspector Shan Series, set in China and Tibet and the Bone Rattler Series, set in Colonial America. His books have been translated into over twenty languages.  

A former resident of Boston and Washington, Pattison resides on an 18th century farm in Pennsylvania with his wife, three children, and an ever-expanding menagerie of animals.

Rediscovering Our Selves Through Historical Fiction: Guest Post by Eliot Pattison

Eliot Pattison:
Rediscovering Our Selves Through Historical Fiction 

Historical novels are carving out a special literary niche as readers begin to more fully grasp their unique value in understanding whom we are and where we came from. All novels should present the possibility for the reader to learn and grow in some dimension, but by tapping the fertile landscape of our past this expanding genre offers endless layers of opportunities for learning about ourselves.

I often ask a simple question of readers who express an interest in exploring historical fiction: where was your DNA two hundred fifty years ago? We are all made up of particles of history. That isn’t just a metaphor, it is a scientific fact. The genes that define you were walking around in the 18th century, when my Bone Rattler novels are set, and long before then. Considering where they were—and they may have been on different continents at the same time—becomes a wonderful key for opening the treasure chest of your past, and historical fiction can be a potent guide to understanding what you find there.

We are all players in the great orchestra of humanity, and while the instruments get passed on to new members from time to time, the music doesn’t change nearly as much as we might think. Those who ignore that reality, who decline to turn and face earlier links in our human chain, diminish their lives and their ability to fully grasp who they are and the society they live in. In the words of novelist Michael Crichton, “if you don’t know history, you’re just a leaf that doesn’t know it is part of a tree.”

I was fortunate enough to discover that I was part of such a tree at an early age, and I have derived nourishment from those roots ever since. It helped that my ancestors choose paths which easily aroused a youth’s curiosity—Highland Scots who migrated to Virginia highlands and other Scots who fled an English army to take up farming in Maryland, as well as multiple ancestors who fought in the American Revolution and Welsh forebears who survived the bloody attacks on Jamestown in the 1620’s. But whether your DNA resided in a German cobbler, a Scythian warrioress, a Venetian weaver, or an African chieftain, it survived an amazing journey. Understanding that journey, and realizing you are engaged in its current leg, enriches our appreciation of our families, and provides important insights into whom we are, not just physically but.also intellectually and spiritually.

Great novels are about characters, and history is derived from characters. The first important step in embracing historical fiction is the recognition that we are all derived from historical characters. Historical novels breathe life into figures who otherwise have become little more than flat paper cut outs in our textbooks. The skilled novelist enlivens these players from the past by using historically accurate venues, vernacular, fashion, and technology. Such aspects bring important color to characters but as valuable as these external attributes may be, the vital elements in reviving people from the other side of time are the internal ones, the hearts and souls of a novel’s cast. By thrusting us into those hearts and souls, such novels translate distant humans into terms we can relate to, allowing those humans to become part of us.

I didn’t get hooked on Wolf Hall because I yearned to know about Tudor court politics, I was hooked because I could identify with the very human, very conflicted character of Thomas Cromwell. Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose and Ellis Peters’ Brother Cadfael novels were successful not because of the late Middle Age history lessons implicit in their pages but because of their poignant, internally resonating portraits of two complex figures who had traded in Crusader armor for monks’ robes. Such historical mysteries can be especially effective at this translation process, for they inexorably draw the reader into conundrums that can’t be solved without getting inside the heads of these long ago characters. The reward, and the challenge, of getting through my own Bone Rattler series is that none of its mysteries can be resolved unless the reader has assimilated elements of 18th century Highland and Native American culture.

Historical fiction ultimately lets us walk beside these participants in our past, allowing us to discover that in reasoning, aspiration, curiosity and passion they differ very little from ourselves. They may speak and dress differently but such differences are only minor variations of hue on the great human palette. Glimpsing how human our forebears were doesn’t simply add to a novel’s entertainment value, it helps us grasp the depth of our own humanity. I write two series set in very different times and places but at their core each is about that shared humanity, about values and elements of natural justice that transcend specific times and cultures and therefore become links across the centuries.

Discovering such bonds with the past has immeasurably enriched my life. Knowing that we share traits and experiences with others who came before us adds new texture to our lives and new strength to our spirit. After better understanding the experiences of both my ancestors and my characters I look at certain places and institutions in profoundly different ways. Our forebears are, inevitably, companions in our life’s journey, who shadow us as we confront the trials and celebrate the joys of our lives, just as we will become silent companions in our descendants’ lives.

Too often in today’s instantly connected culture our feelings, and any opportunity for contemplative decisionmaking, are obscured by the constant noise of social media. A well-crafted historical novel isn’t just an oasis where such distracting influences are banished, it can become a refreshing trek of self discovery. Connecting with those whose blood flows in our veins isn’t simply a pleasant distraction, it is empowering. This is our time to rise up out of the great sea of humanity, but knowing its depths and currents allows us to be more effective navigators in our own journey. Discovering that the past isn’t really past, it just has new faces, is the great reward of historical novels. By investing time in a well-crafted historical novel you might learn to find yourself, from before.

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An international lawyer by training, Joseph Eliot Pattison has spent his career advising and representing U.S. and foreign companies on international investment and trade issues. Described as "a writer of faraway mysteries," Eliot Pattison's travel and interests span a million miles of global trekking, visiting every continent but Antarctica. He received “the Art of Freedom” award along with Ira Glass, Patti Smith and Richard Gere for bringing his social and cultural concerns to his fiction, published on three continents. He is the author of fourteen mystery novels, including the internationally acclaimed Edgar award-winning Inspector Shan Series, set in China and Tibet and the Bone Rattler Series, set in Colonial America. Savage Liberty: A Mystery of Revolutionary America is the fifth in this series. A former resident of Boston and Washington, Pattison resides on an 18th century farm in Pennsylvania with his wife, three children, and an ever-expanding menagerie of animals.

Be sure and check out Eliot Pattison's former posts on Mystery Fanfare. Thanks, Eliot, for contributing!

The Mystery of Human Rights (3/22/17)
Mandarin Gate 12/19/12

The Mystery of Human Rights: Guest post by Eliot Pattison

Described as "a writer of faraway mysteries," Eliot Pattison's travel and interests span a million miles of global trekking, visiting every continent but Antarctica. An international lawyer by training, he received “the Art of Freedom” award along with Ira Glass, Patti Smith and Richard Gere for bringing his social and cultural concerns to his fiction, published on three continents. He is the author of thirteen mystery novels, including the internationally acclaimed Edgar award-winning Inspector Shan Series, set in China and Tibet and the Bone Rattler Series, set in Colonial America. His books have been translated into over twenty languages. A former resident of Boston and Washington, Pattison resides on an 18th century farm in Pennsylvania with his wife, three children, and an ever-expanding menagerie of animals. Eliot Pattison’s new novel Skeleton God, ninth in his award-winning Inspector Shan series, has just been released. He was recently awarded the Art of Freedom prize by Tibet House to honor his support for the cause of Tibetan human rights. 

Eliot Pattison:
The Mystery of Human Rights 

Readers and critics sometimes have a difficult time categorizing my Inspector Shan novels. Some call them police procedurals, others Asian noir or literary thrillers, even political tragedies. A British editor once announced that with this series I had invented a new genre, that of ”campaign thriller.” I leave it to others to conjure up labels, but I do believe that what causes many to stumble in characterizing my novels is their unique undercurrent of human rights advocacy.

After extensive travels around the planet, and experiencing first hand the effects of political tyranny, I began to realize that many activists in the West have sucked the humanity out of the fight for human rights. For them it often seems a matter of ego rather than virtue. Instead of embracing human rights in their hearts they’d rather just wear the cause on their sleeve, and as their voices get louder their causes seem to get smaller. They focus too much on partisan politics and classes of people rather than people themselves. In doing so they avoid the hard and inconvenient questions arising out of modern geopolitics and ignore the truth of the most poignant human rights credo ever articulated: “When a good man is hurt,” the ancient Greek Euripedes observed, “all who would be good must suffer with him.” That credo doesn’t distinguish between suffering just down the road and suffering on the other side of the planet.

It was partly in reaction to this “out of sight, out of mind” mentality that I launched the Inspector Shan series. With these novels I always seek to provide not only an engaging read but also a more personal, visceral look at some of our planet’s most abject human rights abuses. It’s a fine line for a novelist to take. My readers don’t pick up my books to be lectured to, and I work hard not to get up on a soapbox. Some grim lessons about the human cost of modern geopolitics are offered in all my books but the only way to be successful at such messaging is not to force them on readers. I want them to keep turning the pages because of my storylines and characters, and just absorb those lessons along the way..

I admit, however, that I do make it difficult for my readers to engage with my plots without experiencing the painful realities of daily life under tyranny. When, for example, a murder is staged as just another self-immolation protest in the prior Shan book Soul of the Fire, disturbing moral questions are implicit in the incident. What misery are these simple, deeply spiritual people enduring that makes self-immolation a common event? As Shan proceeds with his unofficial, unauthorized investigation and effects his usual makeshift justice, the experience of the Tibetan people takes on much more texture. The unrelenting persecution of Tibetans in their own land is a backdrop to all my novels in the Shan series. An investigation inside a prison or internment camp gives the reader a chance to experience their physical and spiritual brutality through Shan’s eyes. When Shan visits an idyllic nomadic camp or a remote, timeless village, I try to make the reader invested enough in the serenity and natural pleasures of such places to share the gut-wrenching pain when government agents arrive to extinguish that way of life.

The stages I set in my books always have that shadow around their edges, that uncertainty about larger scale injustices lurking below the more focused thefts and murders at the center of my plots. Those stages may get dark at times but all of my books end not just with a triumph of the human spirit, but also with a small but meaningful victory over a system that has institutionalized human rights abuses, a system to which the West has long turned a blind eye. If I am successful I will have prompted my readers to confront questions they had forgotten to ask and ponder that much greater puzzle, the mystery of our modern morality.

On the Importance of Historical Novels: Eliot Pattison guest post

Today I welcome back Edgar Award winning author Eliot Pattison.

Described as "a writer of faraway mysteries," Eliot Pattison is an international lawyer whose travel experiences span a million miles of global trekking and who has advised foreign governments and intersected with many cultures and value systems. He brings his social and cultural concerns to his fiction in three acclaimed mysteries series: the Edgar award-winning Inspector Shan Series, set in China and Tibet, the Bone Rattler series, set in Colonial America, and the Ashes of the Earth series, set 20 years after a global nuclear holocaust. His latest in the series is Original Death (Counterpoint Press/August 2013). For more info visit: www.eliotpattison.com

Eliot Pattison:
On the Importance of Historical Novels 

We are creatures made up of stories. From the time men first took lightning-struck fire into a cave and circled around it we have recounted tales of our forebears, our hunts, our dreams, our journeys, our joys and our woes. Stories are our spiritual DNA. Enough humans repeating enough stories create a culture. A few decades of telling those stories can define a civilization. But somewhere along the way we lost the significance of storytelling. Our histories, our tales of ourselves, grew sterile. They lost the human element, they lost the anchors that create meaningful stories and, more importantly, that define a people.

Leafing through a modern history text is slow torture for me. Those volumes offer no sense of the wonder of our history. They turn their backs on the amazing tales of whom we have been. They are barren, rote accounts laden with statistics. Reflecting our culture’s obsession with celebrity, they ignore the breathtaking journey that has brought us to the present in favor of shallow treatments of past celebrities. They replace the amazing kaleidoscope of our past with lifeless graphs and charts. It should be no surprise that tests show that only twelve percent of our high school seniors rate as proficient in history, or that the average college student’s knowledge of history steadily declines during his or her four-year tenure. When our teachers and textbook authors have lost their excitement about our past there is no hope that they will instill excitement in their students. This is not merely a problem for our educational system, it is a profound problem for our culture. The late Michael Crichton summed up the dilemma perfectly when he said “if you don’t know history then you don’t know anything. You are a leaf that doesn’t know it is part of a tree.”

Modern history texts evade their essential task. We are not about dates of wars and lists of documents. We are about the songs of Roman children, the brushstroke of the Sung dynasty poet, the tears of Iroquois widows and the salt spray off the bow of a Viking longship. It is much more important for us to feel the thrill of early travelers when they encountered the Silk Road or the jaw-dropping experience of holding one of the first printed books than to know the succession of Tudor kings. These are the images and stories that bind us to our forebears. These are the tales that excite us about being human, that resonate at a visceral human level—and history texts ignore them. Historical novels, done well, fill that gap. They immerse us in those vital stories, connect us to the earlier participants in the human struggle whose blood flows in our veins. We have such novels because our histories aren’t good enough.

Eliot Pattison: Mandarin Gate

Eliot Pattison has just published the 7th in his Inspector Shan series, and I'm so pleased that he agreed to write an essay for Mystery Fanfare. I really enjoy his writing, and I'm looking forward to this new Inspector Shan novel, Mandarin Gate.

Eliot Pattison’s award-winning Inspector Shan books have been praised not only for their poignant characters and unorthodox plots but also for their stark, heart-wrenching depiction of life in modern Tibet. Translated into twenty languages, the books have been adapted to radio dramas and become popular on the black market in China. Featuring an exiled and disgraced Chinese investigator who makes a new life among Tibetan lamas after being released from prison, the books cast a long overdue light on an important but oft-neglected part of the world. 

Described as "a writer of faraway mysteries," Eliot Pattison's travel and interests span a million miles of global trekking, visiting every continent but Antarctica. An international lawyer by training, he brings his social and cultural concerns to his fiction and has written several books and dozens of articles on legal and business topics, published on three continents. He is the author of the Edgar award-winning Inspector Shan Series, the Bone Rattler series, and Ashes of the Earth, the first novel in a new dystopian series. But his sentiments for Tibet and the Tibetan resistance run deep. His Inspector Shan books have been characterized as a new "campaign thriller" genre for the way they weave significant social and political themes into their plots. Translated into twenty languages, the books have been adapted to radio dramas and become popular on the black market in China. For more info visit: www.eliotpattison.com 

ELIOT PATTISON:

Years ago when I tested the waters at publishers with my manuscript for the first Shan novel, The Skull Mantra, the typical reaction was “why would you want to set a mystery in such an unfamiliar place as Tibet?” Many rejected the idea out of hand, saying no one would read possibly read such a novel, especially one with heavy doses of esoteric Buddhism woven into the text. Others suggested moving my characters to Brooklyn or the Chinatown of some major American city. I resisted all the armtwisting to shift away from my Tibetan venue and I would venture to say that after an Edgar and now seven books in international translation those early critics somewhat underestimated the audience.

Even today, though, the most frequent question I get from readers is “Why Tibet?” so let me anticipate the point and explain a little more deeply. Tibet was not some random venue chosen for its dramatic landscape and exotic culture. After a million miles of travel around the planet I had begun to feel that modern Tibet had a vital, important message that was largely overlooked in the West. I was interested in writing a mystery, but I was also deeply interested in conveying that message to a broader audience—eventually I realized that writing a mystery set in Tibet was the way to achieve both goals.

What is that vital message that underlies Mandarin Gate and the other Shan books? The juggernaut of the global economy has diminished cultural identities, religion, and human engagement for all of us. Our world steadily becomes less personal, less spiritual, less contemplative—and in Tibet these effects have been magnified a thousandfold. Many of my Western characters are fleeing in some fashion from that juggernaut, but none are prepared for what they encounter at the roof of the world. There is no better example on the planet of how global economics and geopolitics can crush a traditional non-industrial society, or how a faceless police state saps the humanity out of humans.

The totalitarian government in Beijing may be directly responsible for the day-to-day destruction of Tibet but we all have to answer for it, for it has happened on our watch. So many of us bemoan what happened in another century to the original populations of the Americas without ever considering how the same—and in many ways a worse—process is occurring today in Tibet. The Tibetan people have been punished solely because a more technically advanced people wanted their land, wanted their resources, wanted to increase their leverage on the global stage. We allowed that to happen. We empowered Beijing. We are the cause. We are the effect. As an ancient Greek once said, when a good man is hurt, all who would be good suffer with him. We are all Tibetans. The damage to the Tibetan world is an injury to our entire world.

That is the broad stage on which I chose to write, but of course underlying this theme are also counterpoints of compassion and cruelty, spirituality and material greed. Tibet would be worthy as a setting for its people alone. There is a great joy and harmony among Tibetans that has very little to do with what we in the West tend to link to happiness. They are technologically poor but spiritually rich, intellectually sophisticated but materially impoverished. Year after year they stand up to unthinkable acts of repression. The adversity they face, and the heroes and saints it generates, merit much more attention on the world stage.

These are the people I have chosen to inhabit my books. Mandarin Gate thrusts these characters into the gears of the Chinese machine that is crushing their country, which inevitably takes them into the network of prisons and internment camps that have become the Chinese gulag. There is great suffering in and around Tibetan prisons but there is also great nobility. The heart of traditional Tibet may have been in temples and shrines but the essence of modern Tibet lies in its gulag.