SKELETON GOD

Fiction

The stratosphere of Tibet

SKELETON GOD:
An Inspector Shan Tao Yun Mystery
By Eliot Pattison
305 pp. Minotaur Books

Reviewed by Alan Goodman

This is Edgar Award winner Eliot Pattison’s ninth installment in the Inspector Shan series.

The world of Inspector Shan moves along quite slowly as murder mysteries go, particularly in the opening sections. Pattison is a deliberate writer, apparently intent upon setting the detailed backdrop of Tibetan culture as much as he is on drawing the scene of the obligatory opening murder itself.

I mention this because while popular mystery writers such as Michael Connelly, with his detective hero Harry Bosch, rush you along with staccato-like narrative, Inspector Shan moves at a much more leisurely pace. Maybe because I had just finished the Harry Bosch series, it took some time to get down to the new speed limit.

The reward for making this adjustment was to be introduced to a world that one knows mostly from myth – the stratosphere of worlds – the little-known country of Tibet. The story’s narrative works insistently around the abuses heaped upon the citizens of Tibet by Maoist China. The recounting of these abuses, as woven into the story, are quite horrific and serve as a cautionary tale (albeit frustratingly futile) for many overweening civilizations through the history of mankind.

... Shan spoke to the Tibetans about what to expect when they reached the internment camp. They would be kept together as families for two or three weeks of political indoctrination, he explained, and he begged them to submit to the lectures without resistance, or risk being sent to a real prison [they were in a town jail at this time]. The three children in the group were clutched by their parents as he explained that the children would then be sent to boarding schools, and no amount of protest would prevent it. But he told the children to be brave and to find ways to secretly speak Tibetan to their friends, to keep their language alive. He did not have the heart to tell explain that the children would receive new Chinese names and many would have difficulty speaking Tibetan with their parents when they were reunited years later. He did warn that schools would not allow amulets, but in a whisper, holding the shoulders of the youngest child, he suggested they could hide prayers inside candy wrappers or pieces of foil and keep them inside their shirts like secret gaus.

Perhaps what slows Mr. Pattison’s narrative and at the same time renders it so compelling is seeing an inevitability for the myriad ways in which the Chinese subjugated the Tibetan people and destroyed their unique culture. One is tempted to observe that the murder upon which the mystery depends is a secondary interest here to the cultural abuse described with great detail. Nevertheless, this is a murder mystery, and the culprits are eventually found and punished with the nominal destruction of Tibetan culture playing its part, stage front, in the climactic ending.

If you are inclined to read this particular book in the Inspector Shan series, and I recommend it, I would start in the back – not the last pages of the narrative, but the appended Author’s Note. I wish I had done that, as this section offers background to Tibet that one might find beneficial for more easily getting into the narrative of Skeleton God.