Water Touching Stone. By Eliot Pattison. NY: St. Martin’s Minotaur. 413 pages. $24.95.

Reviewed by Margaret Black

For an absolutely absorbing summer read which takes you to distant places among incredibly diverse people yet at the same time makes you think about today’s most serious philosophical, social, and economic problems, you can’t do better than Water Touching Stone. Eliot Pattison’s new mystery again features Shan Tao Yun, the Chinese investigator he introduced in The Skull Mantra.

At the start of the new novel Shan is asked for help by Gundun, senior lama at the secret monastery where Shan took refuge at the end of The Skull Mantra. Gundun tells Shan that far to the north a woman teacher named Lau has been killed and a lama is missing. For reasons not apparent to Shan, this is causing the lamas deep concern. Shan feels utterly beholden to his revered teacher, however, and without hesitation joins a group consisting of Shan, Gundun, a truly dotty old lama named Lokesh, and a bad-tempered Tibetan freedom fighter named Jowa. They leave the relative sanctuary of their mountain hideout and head north across the entire expanse of Tibet. On the way they learn that young orphan boys, students of the murdered teacher Lau, are also being killed, and indeed they witness the death of one.

The scene of the trouble is Xinjiang, China’s westernmost province, a place nearly impenetrable to foreigners because of nuclear missile installations and China’s ongoing conflicts with the region’s native people, Uighurs, Kazakhs, and refugee Tibetans. As the intrepid Shan and his companions struggle down out of the towering ice-covered Kunlun mountains, they arrive at a dreary, depressed, sandblasted little settlement that borders the deadly Taklamakan desert. For hundreds of years this tiny strip of habitable land contained a rich oasis town on the southern branch of the fabulous Silk Road, but now only a few collapsing cinder block structures roofed in windblown corrugated tin mark the presence of humans. That is, except for the gleaming white missile silos (the Mushroom Bowl) and the spanking new concrete dwelling boxes constructed by People’s Brigade as part of the “Poverty Eradication Scheme.” The current crop of Chinese have not come waving Chairman Mao’s little red book and chanting slogans about eliminating feudalism and superstition, but as private entrepreneurs out to make money.

The author’s new setting lets us experience desert sandstorms as well as mountain gales, examine ancient underground irrigation systems as well as huge secret cave paintings. We get 2500-year-old mummies, fascinating artifacts, contemporary smuggling, and even a last roundup of horses (much sadder than you’d think). In particular, Pattison does a superb job of dramatizing how helicopters have transformed the old cat-and-mouse game between authorities and dissidents, much to the advantage of the cats.

Shan, a wanted criminal if the authorities ever see the tattoo on his arm and log onto their computers, must unravel the competing interests of the state’s Public Prosecutor (a woman aptly named the Jade Bitch), the local Public Security (the secret police, that is, not at all the same thing as the governmental legal authority), and the powerful head of the entrepreneurial People’s Brigade. Most important, of course, Shan must figure out why the crimes are happening and how to stop them. Complicating the issue is the fact that Shan is clearly Chinese himself and therefore an object of enmity and distrust among all the people he is seeking to help.

Solution to mysteries within mysteries are always intriguing, but Pattison increases the complexity considerably by introducing a philosophical element. At the same time that Shan attempts to employ all his old rational investigative skills – in one brilliant riff he solves an extraneous mini-mystery to prove his “credentials” to a distrustful but necessary ally – Shan finds that lessons he has learned from the Tibetan Buddhists give him new, sometimes more effective insights.

Water Touching Stone suffers in comparison with The Skull Mantra in minor ways. The first novel allowed Shan, a Chinese functionary who had been tortured and imprisoned in a Tibetan gulag, to grow and change dramatically. His further evolution in this novel is more subtle and modest. The sly humor in the first book has largely disappeared, and while the author has created some marvelous characters in Water Touching Stone, too many of them tend to be purely good or evil. One figure, a descendant of White Russians, really tried my patience, and the final Gotterdammerung of his lair went over the top for me. More damaging, some elements of the mystery became obvious to me before they did to Shan, which undermined his alleged perspicacity. The author has so many different characters and settings that he must constantly repeat identifying information, and this can be irritating. But these minor flaws don’t spoil the fantastic evocation of place, a complex, exciting, multifaceted story, and a fascinating meditation on how the modern world best destroys old cultures.