the space between

By PARVATI SHARMA

If I had a frequent flier mile for every time Ive been advised that I simply must read Pico Iyer, Id have traversed the world many times over. Still, for no particular reason, I never got around to reading any of Iyers many popular, muchlauded travelogues—Video Nights in Kathmandu, Falling off the Map, The Open Road—until the author began to assume something of the quality of an alluring, faraway destination himself, in my head; a place Id save up to get to one day.

The Man Within My Head may, or may not, have been the best place to begin. for one thing, Iyers latest offering isnt, strictly speaking, a travelogue—though also, it is: conjured against the landscapes of Bolivia, Cuba, California, and exploring not just peoples and terrains but Iyers own past and, in a way, the birth of his own imagination. all these many parts revolve around a central, disarming conceit—that the man within Iyers head is Graham Greene. “Im interested in how one can feel closer to someone ones never met than to those ones known all ones life,” Iyer explains, “Why do I feel he understands me as nobody Ive met in my life can do? Why do I feel that I understand him, as none of his other readers quite do?”

The bond runs deep, to coincidences both small and uncanny (Greenes son and Iyer went to the same school; Greene and Iyer step out of the same hotel, 35 years apart, into a cab and have “a stranger slip in, promising to show [them] around”), to fundamental ideas of what it means to be fallible, moral, human.

as much as The Man Within My Head is about Greene as an imaginary father-figure, it is also about Iyers own father, the philosopher Raghavan Iyer; and as such, it is a book about men who spent their lives thinking and writing, often a beautiful meditation on what it means to live a life through words. “at the end of his life,” writes Iyer, “Greene seems to be wondering… if hes ever loved at all… Sometimes Id wondered the same thing about my father, or even myself; words came so easily to him that I could not tell how much he was inside them, how much outside, knowing just the effect that eloquence can have… Id turned to writing because it offered few escape routes or hiding places; its harder to lie to yourself on the page than in the world. But of course living with words had moved me to trust most those moments that come only when words run out.”

The greatest pleasure of this “counterbiography”, as its author calls it, is Iyers own eloquence, his quite extraordinary lightness of touch on subjects that are almost purely abstract. To read it is to understand something of Graham Greene, certainly, and something of Iyer and his father and the countries all three men escaped and embraced, yes; but it is also to understand how we become who we are and why, if at all and ephemerally, this is important.

Hamish Hamilton/Penguin India; 499