Seven Years in Tibet, Heinrich Harrar - Book Review
Set against the backdrop of the Second World War and Tibet's
impending invasion by China, Harrar pens an evocative account of
a country suspended in time. Medieval in many ways, it is a
place none-the-less, readers will deeply regret having
missed.
Lhasa was not Shangrila. The capital city of Tibet was dirty and
lacked sanitation; books and recreation were hard to come by;
the diet was limited; medicine was more shamanistic than
practical; and technology (even the wheel) was looked upon with
suspicion. Even so, it was a city easy for the Western
imagination to fall in love with; laughter was a constant;
curiosity and pleasure were valued beyond industry; and inspite
of a rigorous religiosity, the Tibetans were perhaps the least
moralizing people of the modern era.
It's with a great breath of mountain air that Harrar references
the guilelessness of his hosts; how for instance laughter was a
constant and jokes, retold century after century, never failed
to solicit mirth. Curiousity, religion, and pleasure were all
valued beyond industry. An earthworm in a shovel of dirt would
stop the construction of a ditch, the departure of a friend
would require elaborate farewells, and the changing of a season
would require the performance of one ritual or another.
Festivals, parties, and social interactions kept Lhasans engaged
-- modernity's harried pace most emphatically did not.
I mention this at the outset as a way of explaining why Seven
Years in Tibet has endured as an adventurer's tale. Apart from
the power of its narrative and quality of Harrar's prose, it
proves exactly what every wanderer wants to believe; that he or
she can stumble away from the complexities of today (a British
POW camp) into the simplicity of yesterday (Lhasa circa 1940).
It's escapist literature writ large. And more-over, its literal.
Harrar arrived in Lhasa unbidden, unwelcome, and on the lam from
a British internment camp. Tenacity brought him through the
city's defenses. The size of his heart endeared him to the
locals. In anecdote after anecdote we are reminded that he gave
as much as he was given. - translation services, medical advice,
engineering ... At first a novelty in the capital, he soon
became indispensable, and later a fixture.
Essentially, Harrar escaped WWII, and rode out the war in a
place as far removed from the conflict as was culturally and
geographically possible. The fact that he was a German citizen
figures into it only tangentially; serving, more than anything,
to illustrate what it means to be a decent human being, while
one's countrymen are being horribly indecent ... he never deigns
to impose his values, language or politics. And while
perpetually curious, he is never curious in the way the throngs
descending on travel hotspots today are. Granted, his primary
motivations were self-motivated (escape and curiosity), but each
action was self-less. And, while it all must have been terribly
complex ... what with geopolitical and practical issues ... none
of it seems to have been complicated at all. From the escape
attempts to the engineering of waterworks, and construction of a
movie theatre Harrar takes his situation in hand and continues
apace. While there are instances where he records being homesick
(Christmas in Lhasa), for the most part he conveys the feeling
that there is no place he'd rather be. It's this trait exactly
that makes his account as endearing and enduring as it is.
That said, no one would care a whit about Harrar's, Seven Years
in Tibet if it weren't written well, or failed to intersect with
the contemporary zeitgeist. Like Joshua Slocum's, Sailing Alone
Around the World, it's an example of a non-writer penning an
account of first class narrative and literary power. And like
Cherry-Gerrards, The Worst Journey in the World, it isn't so
much timeless, as it is modern in the proper sense ... the
prose, content and subject all seem perfectly suited to readers
many decades later. There is none of that awkward disconnect
between presentation and content that readers of late 19th
century adventure literature will be familiar with. It is
direct. It feels honest. And it is not couched in acres of
excess verbiage. Readers will get from point A to point Z and
will have hardly sensed the passage. It fits somehow, with where
we are today. For a variety of reasons it will engage the
millennial mind.
Trevor Paetkau Proprietor, Moraine Adventure Books
Ps. At the risk of banging on a last point should be touched on
... religion obviously played a role in determining the
characteristics of the nation ... Tibet was a theocracy with its
fingers in every pie. Feudal overlords managed the provinces,
monks and governors with inherited privilege governed Lhasa.
Unlike our so many of our contemporary religious leaders
however, the Tibetans were able to accept and revere the faith
of outsiders. To their detriment, they remained neutral during
the war ... a neutrality that may contributed to the invasion by
China and ultimate dismantling of Tibetan culture.
In the Epilogue written in 1996, Harrar makes note of the
1.2million Tibetans who lost their lives to the conflict, and
near complete ransacking of the nation's 6,000 monasteries and
shrines. It had to have been a horrible introduction to
modernity. And alas, it was the last nail in the coffin of our
Western dreams of Shangrila.
Pss. Readers wishing to read a contemporary account of the
region should check out Wickliffe Walker's, Courting the Diamond
Sow. It's an account of the fated first descent of the Tsangpo
by American kayakers. It travels through much of the spiritual
terrain traversed by Heinrich Harrar. A great companion piece.