Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Volume 7 Number 1, April 2006

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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.