A mystery of unraveling

Look up the word “mystery” in any good dictionary, and you’ll find a definition that has been effectively pushed aside over the centuries by conventional usage: “a religious truth that one can know only by revelation and cannot fully understand.” Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate, for example, makes mention of the Assumption of Mary, the Eucharist and even the secret rites of certain Eleusinian and Mithraic cults before proffering definitions dealing with crime fiction or everyday inscrutability.

Mystery plays an important part in every religion. Zen Buddhists long for the lightning flash of satori. Christians speak of being born again. Judaism opens the door to revelatory transcendence via the esoteric codes of cabala. And followers of the mystical strain of Islam known as Sufism describe their ecstatic communions with God in the rapturous language of love poetry.

Pico Iyer’s new novel is a mystery about mystery. Its religiously minded protagonist is John Macmillan, a graduate student lost in the morass of a yet-to-be-completed dissertation on Sufi poetry and half a world away from his native England. Having recently left home -- and the woman he loved -- for the alien resplendence of Santa Barbara, John finds himself afflicted with a kind of dreamy dislocation that makes him particularly susceptible to the stanzas of Rumi, the 13th century Sufi poet whose verse was suffused with longing for a love that was always just beyond his grasp.

When we meet John, he is in Damascus, combing the streets for information on lost Sufi manuscripts that may have been smuggled out of Iran during the 1979 revolution. Though his dissertation isn’t necessarily dependent on them, their recovery has become John’s obsession, distracting him from his work and throwing his fellowship, and with it his American residency, into jeopardy.

In Damascus, John is asked by one of his dead-end sources to deliver a present to a woman in Santa Barbara upon his return. Discharging this duty leads him to the woman’s sister, Camilla Jensen, an enigmatic L.A.-based actress whose neediness at first repels John, then coaxes him back, presenting an entirely new kind of distraction. When he falls deeply in love with Camilla, who proves to be as elusive as she is attractive, the abstracted anguish of Rumi’s poems is suddenly made devastatingly concrete. “Their theme was not so much the intoxication as the more resonant and lasting question of what comes after,” John realizes. “He’d thought the poems were about passion; now he saw that that was true only insofar as passion, in the Latin, meant ‘suffering.’ ”

Iyer is best known for his colorful and astute travel writing, but he’s also a trenchant literary critic whose work has appeared in the New York Review of Books for many years. In “Abandon,” he neatly fuses the idea of outward journeys with that of inward journeys, into sacred texts. While John’s scholarly pursuits take him all over the globe, from Syria to L.A. to Spain to India, he simultaneously embarks on a voyage into a still and empty space inside him, the door to which has been unlocked by Sufi equations of passion and piety.

His feelings for Camilla release a slow-acting spiritual agent, preparing him for enlightenment. (It’s no coincidence that the novel opens in Damascus, on the road to which Saul of Tarsus was converted into the apostle Paul.) Camilla’s secretiveness, strange phone calls, chance meetings and the unlikely connections that emerge between seemingly marginal characters who pop in and out of John’s life -- these are the ingredients, to be sure, of a more traditional mystery tale, one ending with bullets, police cars and tidy explanations.

But the solution to John’s mystery, paradoxically, isn’t to be found by putting all the pieces together. Rather, he must follow the lead of the Sufis and abandon everything: his preconceptions about poetry and religion, his hold on the elusive Camilla, indeed his entire life as he has been living it. (At one point, a postal worker upbraids John for not retrieving his piled-up mail: “People could get the wrong kind of idea.”) Only in this state of negative capability can he be ready to receive the gift of understanding, which is bestowed on him, significantly, by his beloved. With this, Iyer drives home his own poetic point: The longing we feel for our loved ones on Earth is but a reflection of divine longing, and the key to satisfying both is to make oneself completely open and vulnerable.

“Abandon” is a contemplative novel, filled with ideas, not action. Slow and careful readers will be rewarded. Iyer has a poet’s gift for the sharply drawn, just-right descriptive (in his words, the stalls of Delhi look “like they’d been swept forty years ago toward a wastepaper basket they’d never quite reached”), and even the most swooning exchanges between these lovers are backed up by real ideas. “Abandon” is quietly powerful; not quick in revealing its byzantine mysteries, perhaps, but generous in its insights once it does. *