Consciousness,
Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume
7 Number 1, April 2006
_______________________________________________________________
Hathaway,
William T. Summer Snow. St. Albert: Avatar, 2005. 203pp. ISBN
09738442-3-X, $14.99 paperback.
http://www.avatarpublication.com/books/?id=13
http://www.peacewriter.org
Reviewed
by
Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe
University
of Wales Aberystwyth
Jeff
Madsen is a Vietnam veteran now working with USAID in the Central Asian Republic
of Kyrgyztan. He gets involved with anti-terrorist activities when he
interferes, ultimately unsuccessfully, with terrorists about to steal a nuclear
bomb, and helps US soldiers stationed in the country in their desperate attempts
to regain the weapon. In the process he meets Cholpon, a woman in her
mid-thirties and her teacher Djamila—she is a mystic, teaching a combination
of Sufism and transcendental meditation. Jeff learns their meditation, and
Djamila locates the missing bomb in a mystic dance vision.
How they get to the bomb and rescue it from both US soldiers and al Quaeda
militants becomes the climax of William T. Hathaway’s second novel, Summer Snow.
At 203 pages, the text is dense, and the story is as non-linear as such density
allows, interweaving vivid descriptions of the Kyrgyz landscape, dialogue and
critical reflections on the political situation of Central Asia in the context
of world events. Hathaway brings many aspects of his personal experience to this
novel. He was in the US special forces in Panama and Vietnam. Many aspects of
warfare come across as factually accurate when he describes the machinery
involved, the nuances of how different weapons feel when handled, how they
respond in action. Equally, the descriptions of the soldier as warrior are
striking, extending from (self-)disgust in times of (relative) calm to the
remarkably wide range of terms for different kinds of pains resulting from
related kinds of injuries, and culminating in the rush of adrenaline, feelings
of power and responsibility and the split-second decisions required in the heat
of action.
Hathaway spent a year
and a half in Central Asia to research and write the novel. As a result, the
images of the landscapes and the people come across as lively, colourful and
authentic. Hathaway’s involvement in current politics as an anti-war activist
is apparent in the sharply observed political analysis of the Central Asian
situation in the context of post 9/11, post Afghanistan, post Iraq political
scene of the world, dominated by the Bush agenda.
Hathaway’s
involvement with spirituality, in particular the Transcendental Meditation
movement, is evident in the way he integrates spirituality in a discourse of war
and terrorism, which is clearly the opposite to anything spiritual. The novel
thrives no end on this gentle juxtaposition of opposites. Cholpon is the
disciple of the master, Djamila. Hathaway elegantly and tenderly transposes the
guru-shishya relationship, which we know from India in a predominantly male –
male context, to different cultural and gender contexts; however, the
characteristics remain: the older teacher, with the advantage of more practice,
more experience, who reveals knowledge of some of the disciple’s mind and soul
that are still unknown to the disciple herself, who guides the disciples through
the teaching of meditation, and through guidance in daily life, who can perceive
at a distance, who can make her presence felt to others as if in a dream, who
can sense the whereabouts of the nuclear bomb, miles and miles away. And the
younger disciple, trusting but still showing remnants of doubt (in herself,
mainly, but sometimes also her teacher), able to grasp, intuitively, the
dimension of the teacher and what she teaches. Jeff, the warrior, learns the
meditation, Djamila teaches him, and he experiences release from some of the
trauma deeply ingrained in his body (beyond the many scars), and his mind. He
experiences inner peace that he did not expect could exist. The hardened
warriors of Kyrgyztan are softened by the influence of the women practicing
their meditation for a whole night—inner peace of the individual can have,
Hathaway makes very clear, an impact not only on that individual, but on others
not involved in such practice at all, not even knowing it is taking place.
Those three levels of
personal experience, war, Central Asia and spirituality, make Hathaway’s novel
very powerful in its impact: the book gets across to the reader what motivates a
warrior, what he engages in, what he sees (human beings wounded and dying), with
what he feels in the various phases of war, and how horrible all this is, how
painful. Ultimately, in the wider political context, and especially against the
background of the spiritual dimension, the novel demonstrates how utterly
futile, pointless, idiotic and totally unnecessary war is, achieving nothing but
suffering, misery and human waste. More than that, Summer Snow offers an
alternative in its spiritual dimension: The transcendental meditation peace
technique, as Hathaway points out in the “Author’s Afterword”, really
exists and has been shown empirically to enhance peace.
The book, overall, is
a very good read. It is dense, intense, and rewarding. It works as a thriller,
it works as a love story, it works as a spiritual novel, it works as an anti-war
eye-opener, and best of all, it works on all those levels at
the same time, elegantly juxtaposing its different aspects, elements and
levels, creating at the same time an intimacy with the characters and a distance
from them and their fates, their karmas, their stories and their development.
Such simultaneity of intimacy and distance is a characteristic of the higher
(state of) consciousness that the meditation Hathaway describes leads to.
Reading that simultaneity in Hathaway’s book takes the readers' minds
closer to such consciousness themselves, not intellectually, but in the act of
reading.