Close Relations

T.H. Barrett

• The Buddha of Brewer Street by Michael Dobbs
  HarperCollins, 288 pp, £16.99, January 1998, ISBN 0 00 225412 3
• The Book of Tibetan Elders: Life Stories and Wisdom from the Great Spiritual Masters of Tibet by Sandy Johnson
  Constable, 282 pp, £17.95, February 1997, ISBN 0 09 476950 8
• The Art of Tibet by Robert Fisher
  Thames and Hudson, 224 pp, £7.95, November 1997, ISBN 0 500 20308 3
• Tibetan Nation: A History of Tibetan Nationalism and Sino-Tibetan Relations by Warren Smith Jr.
  Westview, 732 pp, £59.50, December 1996, ISBN 0 8133 3155 2
• The Way to Freedom by His Holiness The Dalai Lama
  Thorsons, 181 pp, £7.99, February 1997, ISBN 0 00 220043 0
• Awakening the Mind, Lightening the Heart by His Holiness The Dalai Lama
  Thorsons, 238 pp, £8.99, February 1997, ISBN 0 00 220045 7
• Kundun: A Biography of the Family of the Dalai Lama by Mary Craig
  HarperCollins, 392 pp, £17.99, May 1997, ISBN 0 00 627838 8

If you can’t keep a good man down, it’s no wonder if that genuine rarity, a very good man, sometimes seems to be incessantly on the up and up. The Dalai Lama has already achieved cinematic immortality in Seven Years in Tibet, even though obliged to survive association with a slightly dodgy Austrian (but so did the UN), and has further film apotheoses in prospect, threatening to turn even Gandhi into an also-ran. Meanwhile, he makes a cameo appearance in Michael Dobbs’s new Good-fellowe thriller, which revolves around the hunt for his next incarnation in London. The Chinese villains are as dastardly as one might wish from HarperCollins, as sinister as the Manchu embassy officials who in 1896 kidnapped the obscure Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat-Sen in London and made him world famous, yet ultimately human enough for their allied Anglo-Tibetan opponents to outwit them. Thomas Goodfellowe MP, fictional hero as battered old teddy bear, is due for another outing this autumn, says the blurb. By then, where will our real-life hero, the Dalai Lama, be?