The Skull Mantra: a novel. By Eliot Pattison. NY: St. Martin's Minotaur, 1999. 403 pages. $24.95.

Reviewed by Margaret Black

Occasionally a mystery novel appears with an intriguingly intricate crime, but also with characters and ambiance so superior that the book breaks completely out of its narrow genre. The Skull Mantra, set in the bleak gulag world of modern Tibet, is such a work. Readers will doubtless begin by comparing author Eliot Pattison to Martin Cruz Smith, and the book to Gorky Park or Polar Star, but by the end I think they will find The Skull Mantra a deeper, more satisfying story.

As the novel opens, Shan Tao Yun, a former investigator of economic corruption at the very centers of Chinese power, has been tortured and imprisoned indefinitely at the most distant gulag possible. In the frigid, windswept mountains, Shan is now breaking rocks as part of a largely Tibetan Buddhist convict crew, the People's 404th Construction Brigade. Seeing a fellow prisoner, a former monk, about to allow himself to fall over a precipice into a deep gorge, Shan intervenes to save the man's life. "Taking four" such suicide is called, because in Buddhist canon suicide necessarily entails reincarnation as a lower life form, almost assuredly one on four legs. But Shan is mistaken. The monk is not attempting suicide; he is instead contemplating an utterly unlikely object lying on a tiny ledge just below the rim of canyon -- a gold cigarette lighter.

Here, within the first two pages, the book's compelling attractions begin to emerge -- exceptional descriptions of an incredible landscape, fascinating exploration of a completely different culture, complicated characters who grow and change, and an engrossing, complex mystery for which the solution is literally a matter of life and death for more than a hundred people.

The plot moves along at a great clip. By page 3 the 404th has uncovered the headless body of a Chinese man, dressed in expensive Western clothes and clutching over two hundred American dollars. The next day the completely expendable Shan has been commandeered by dour, demanding Colonel Tan, the officer in charge of the entire region, to compose an investigation report that will pass muster with the Ministry of Public Security in Beijing.

In no time flat the author has involved an American mining operation, an ancient cave covered with paintings and full of gold-covered skulls, archaeological treasures from looted Tibetan monasteries, a parallel investigation by another set of Chinese officials, a Tibetan underground group, animist shamans, and a village of outcast ritual butchers who chop up dead humans for "sky burial" by vultures.

Meanwhile the 404th has stopped work and begun round-the-clock chanting, apparently because the victim appears to have been killed by Tamdin, a fearsome demon of Tibetan mythology who defends the Buddhist faith. Special Public Security troops are rushed in, and the entire 404th will be machine-gunned if the strike continues. Shan's horror at what he knows will happen is compounded by the respect and admiration he has come to have for these monks who have failed to "break the chains of feudalism." He has even come to resemble them, for he has forcibly been stripped of all worldly attachments, the state they voluntarily attempt to achieve. As the investigation proceeds, Shan would gladly rid himself of his only remaining possession, a bedrock integrity, for all his evidence keeps pointing to conclusions he cannot bear to accept.

The characters in this absorbing story have made both obvious and secret accommodations in order to survive, but most also privately adhere with great passion to at least one small principle because it gives an otherwise brutal existence some meaning. Tan, a committed Communist yet a realist about power, is convinced that China must drag Tibet out of what he personally believes are centuries of superstition and oppression. Nevertheless, events force him, like Shan, to question his convictions. Yeshe, a Tibetan former prisoner, vacillates between his past as a monk and the bright lure of university study and a modern future. Tyler Kincaid, an American mining engineer, has finally found meaning and purpose in Tibet, but his principled motives produce unintended results. Choje, the saintly leader of the convict monks, must determine whether lies and deception can serve truth and goodness.

The novel even has humor. Shan doesn't include in his initial report a sarcastic suggestion he made that perhaps a meteorite accidentally severed the victim's head. Colonel Tan is disappointed. "No meteorite?" Tan says, "I liked the meteorite. A certain Buddhist flavor. Predestination from another world." A veteran of innumerable self-criticism sessions, Shan has long since developed such deliciously irritating responses to verbal threats and goads as "I constantly endeavor to fulfill the trust the people have bestowed in me."

Never once slighting his plot, the author explores a variety of Tibetan beliefs, deftly separating levels of sophistication in understanding and unobtrusively showing different kinds of commitment. He also evokes place brilliantly, from the echoing basements of the spectacular Potala palace in Tibet's capital, Llasa, to a tiny herding camp on the vast, infinitely lonely Kham plateau.

Pattison, prior to this a writer on international policy and frequent traveler to China, brings the exotic world he portrays to vivid and authentic life. The Skull Mantra is a great escapist reading, yet at the same time you cannot help but learn, be enlightened, and rejoice at how skillfully the author portrays the myriad manifestations of the human spirit.