Standing by the Door - A Book Review of
Abandon - By Pico Iyer

It’s 4 A.M. Nasruddin leaves the tavern and walks the town aimlessly. A policeman stops him. “Why are you walking the streets in the middle of the night?” “Sir,” replies Nasruddin, “if I knew the answer to that question, I would have been home hours ago!”

- From The Essential Rumi, Translations by Coleman Barks.

John Macmillan, the central character of Pico Iyer’s latest novel, Abandon, has wandered far from home. But like many a traveler who journeys to distant lands in search of strange sights and exotic adventures, he finds himself confronted with his own restlessness and uncertainties. As he works out his obsession with the poetry of Rumi, and tries to unravel the mysteries presented by his new love, a love that has come in a strange uninvited way into his life, the author frames the story of this romance with a plot that takes John to those very strange and exotic places, where Iyer the intrepid travel-writer is at his best. The sights and sounds of Syria and Spain, the streets of Iran, the old houses of India – “the tang” as Iyer describes it elsewhere – provide the atmospherics that give the novel at times, the feel of film noire, “thin alleyways trailing off into silence”, huddled figures, secret orders, whirling dervishes.

John Macmillan has left England to study in Santa Barbara, where he is struggling to complete his dissertation on Islamic mystical poetry, while trying to see the world through Sufi eyes. The story begins with John in Damascus, where he has come in an attempt to trace a secret manuscript of Sufi poems, which rumours say was smuggled out of Iran at the time of the Islamic Revolution. Being a graduate student of religious studies and Sufism in particular, he is hoping that his discovery would allow him to complete the thesis he is working on, shaking the world of Islamic studies to its roots. Through his academic supervisor he contacts an old reclusive scholar in Damascus, who has nothing to offer him, but recruits him into carrying a gift back to Kristina Jensen in California. He attempts to contact Kristina but instead reaches Camilla her sister. Thus begins the long and sometimes tedious, relationship of John and Camilla.

We see Camilla largely through John’s eyes, at times arrogant, at times understanding, often trying to extract a mystical meaning out of her strange and secretive comings and goings. He valiantly tries but fails to immerse himself in his studies and his books, and though he tells her he is “taken” they plunge into a complicated and complex ritual of loving and lovemaking. Before he fled from England and all that it meant for him, he was “taken” by his English girl friend Martine, whose sister Dominique makes a fleeting appearance here. The two English sisters are of course there as a contrast to Kristina and Camilla, the two American sisters. But it is not Martine who should worry Camilla. It slowly becomes clear that if at all John is “taken”, it is by Rumi, the thirteenth century poet, who so permeates the novel that he is almost a character in it. Through his poetry, through the mysterious manuscripts, through the lectures at John’s seminars, his is perhaps the strongest voice in the book.

The story of Rumi and Shams-I Tabriz, which John recounts to Camilla twice in the novel, once with his own happy ending and once with the truth, is something that John grasps at as a parallel to explain his own relationship with Camilla, hoping (against hope?) that she may be the cause for his transformation, bestowing him with the Sufi eyes he so longs for. The fact is that Shams came into Rumi’s life mysteriously; the two became inseparable friends, much to the chagrin and jealousy of Rumi’s disciples and relatives. “On the night of December 5,1248, as Rumi and Shams were talking, Shams was called to the back door. He went out never to be seen again. Most likely he was murdered with the connivance of Rumi’s son, Allaedin; if so Shams indeed gave his head for the privilege of mystical Friendship.” (Coleman Barks).

It was after Shams’ death that Rumi produced his best poetry. It is finally Camilla who presents John with a mysterious manuscript even as she disappears for the time being. The novel ends with John and Camilla making a trip to Iran, but it would not be fair to reveal more than that of the plot here.

As Camilla says at one point, “This reminds me of the stories I used to read when I was a child…. About transformation and magic doors and people who went through these hidden doors and came upon a hidden world”. The word dervish is probably derived from a term meaning “standing by the door”. Has the author prised open that door just a little bit? Or are we all, like John-o and Pico, standing at the doorway, like the nomad’s dog, while Rumi’s dervish says “I take refuge with God when the dog of arrogance attacks,” and the owner has to say, “So do I! I’m helpless against this creature even in my own house! Just as you can’t come close, I can’t go out!”

Pico Iyer does come close. Very close. He seems to have taken to heart, John’s supervisor Sefadhi’s advice to his prize pupil. ‘“Our mission,” the older man had said, in the lightly conspiratorial tone he favored, “is to smuggle a little of the Sufi light into the smog of California.” ’ Pico Iyer’s scintillating use of words has opened some of those magic doors, where the reader who is willing to abandon herself may walk through. Nowhere is this more evident than in his use of the word abandon to connote so many layers of meaning. “Abandonment is the crime that God is accused of by man…. Even Jesus on the Cross raised the same complaint: “O Father, Father, why hast thou abandoned me?”. The word “desert” comes from the Latin “deserere”, meaning to abandon. “Yet what if we take the word a little differently? …. What if God gets so lost in the delight, the forgetfulness, of creating, that what He’s making somehow takes on a life of its own, as we say? What, in other words, if the abandonment that God is guilty of is not that of desertion but, rather, of rapture, the neglectfulness of the artist who lets the work take over?”

Did Pico Iyer also get lost in the delight of creating John and Camilla, got so forgetful even as he was creating them, that they acquired a life of their own?

In a recent interview with Allison Heilborn on the Random House website, Iyer says about Camilla’s character, “My hope is that many readers will begin by recoiling from Camilla--and not understanding why John would see anything in her--and then, as the book goes on, come to be more and more intrigued, and even taken, with her.” Unfortunately, it does not seem to work quite that way. How one wishes it had! In fact the reverse may be happening. The reader is intrigued initially. But as the relationship wears on, Camilla begins to grate and becomes more and more tedious, her eyes welling up with tears at almost anything that John might say.

The novel would indeed have been a much stronger work if the thoughts and ideas of Sufism, the Sufi light, as Sefadhi had advised, had been “smuggled in” through the development of John and Camilla’s characters, rather than through a number of other devices. Lectures, seminars, pamphlets, extracts from journals, and finally parts of John’s own dissertation are used to explain ideas about Sufism, a legitimate enough device in a novel that has an academic backdrop, but perhaps done once too often.

In the same interview, Iyer speaks of John’s character as more of a challenge …“Many or most readers can't understand why John keeps opening the door to her. And yet opening the door is the key act in this book, and what Sufism, or coming to California mean to me.” Yet it is not physical action, but cerebral activity and words, words, words that mark John’s life and relationships. They meet children named Cloud and Skye, playing in a half-built (abandoned?) house. He and Camilla talk through the nights, in houses being built in the daytime, abandoned at night. One is reminded of what Hafiz, another Sufi poet, said:

Even angels fear that brand of madness

That arrays itself against the world 

And throws sharp stones and spears into

The innocent

And into one’s self.

O I know the way you can get

If you have not been drinking Love:

You might rip apart

Every sentence your friends and teachers say,

Looking for hidden clauses.

Iyer, aware of this, cautions John and Camilla (and us), speaking through the Sufi teacher: “You do not come to the Sufi way through your mind. The mind is a knife useful only for cutting apart. You do not come to our path through your heart. The heart is a shield for defending yourself against truth. You come to it through grief. Through the shock that breaks you open.”

Abandon is a novel with a happy ending. John gets his manuscript. Camilla finally travels to Iran. Standing by the magic door we watch them over the skies of Teheran.

 As Rumi says, “Wherever there is a ruin, there is a hope for treasure.”