Tulku by Peter Dickinson

Tulku by Peter Dickinson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

When you are having a time of it, I think you don’t really read what you’re reading. You perform a semblance of reading; you mimic the gestures that you have learned and performed for years now, most likely, because the muscle memory gets you through, but the page stays somehow distant from your reading of it. You are acquaintances at some formal function; a distant, vaguely familiar face that you know from somewhere and can’t quite figure out where, but then the thing – the pressing, big thing, that has been pulling you away from the word, the page, from everything, really, comes back to you and you are powerless to resist it.

And so the books are read; the library loans are returned, more are picked up because that’s what you do (it’s what we all do, we read in hope of what’s to come) and yet the more you do it, the more distant it becomes because the thing is all about you and it’s starting to even push the page away and you’re nothing but at its mercy by now, because you’re tired and you’ve only got so much inside of you, and so you let it and the book slides away from you just that little bit more; that face becomes somebody you thought you once knew, a memory but then, not even that, not even an itch of a memory but just a gentle, soft skip in the day that you register vaguely, softly, before moving on, before returning to the thing, before looking for the light within it, before looking.

And when it gets to that point, when you know the light is there but it’s just not coming soon enough, when frustration starts to set in, you make space. You clear the decks, scour the surfaces and make it clean for something else yet to come, you look at the pile of books by your bed and send half of them to the charity shop bag because it’s been months and things aren’t going to change now are they, and the other half you start to read through. Some you discount in a handful of pages (for we have no time for that and even less inclination) and some you read all the way through out of sheer orneriness and then all of a sudden, there’s the one that you try once, twice, and it doesn’t work, and for a moment it hovers over the bag, before you try it one last time.

And realise it’s probably the best thing you’ve read in months, maybe even all year.

There’s these moments in it, these little physical moments of realisation, and they feel like a little poke in your shoulder, a reminder that amidst everything, amidst all of the things and the noise and the world, that stories, that language, can still do this. That people still have these kind of stories within them, that they are yet to be discovered and that you are discovering one right now. That you are reading passages that, when you are done, make you go back to trace the curve of the sentence and watch the light little twist of movement when you least expect it.

You try to rationalise it: this is a simple story of adventure set during the Boxer Rebellion. A boy loses his family (this is no spoiler, this is children’s literature) and finds another. They travel towards Tibet and then there is everything, all of a sudden, on the page. Religion. Philosophy. Grief. Hope. Fear. Family. Shades of everything in between. And all of it is so distinctly itself that it makes you genuinely envious of it, that you want to almost eat it, that you kind of want to unpick it as if it is some great piece of tapestry and that by examining each thread that’s part of it, you might figure out how it does what it does.

This is writing, then, where everybody is endlessly memorable, their personality stamped upon the page, a gun toting botanist, her lover, a fatherless boy; it’s Kipling and adventure but then all of a sudden it’s this big and brilliant exploration of faith and belief and how to think about the world that you’re in and it’s so breathtakingly confident and able and deft that you kind of feel it in your stomach every time it happens and every time it does, you think: this, this is the light, this.

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