RITES OF SACRIFICE

by Windsor Chorlton ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 23, 1990

An out-of-the-ordinary first novel in which a rather spineless American anthropologist and a very disturbed Scottish missionary--in company with a gang of fierce mountain men--trek across the Himalayas on a mission to pick up a fleeing Chinese general. Only the moral climate is bleaker than the physical conditions facing Walter Melville--a gutless anthropologist-for-hire who has allowed himself to be browbeaten and bribed into abandoning his comfortably empty life in Japan to join a Kuomintang-sponsored expedition from Nepal, through Tibet, and into China to escort General Liu as he flees Mao's China to take retirement in the West. Melville's cheerless companion for the trip is Alan Gunn, whose service as a medical missionary to China ended in a four-year jail term when he was unjustly convicted as a spy by the new communist government. Gunn has returned to atone for real and imagined sins against the Tibetans, with whom he had worked prior to his arrest. Gunn and Melville set out with a pack of appropriately fierce Tibetans, each with his own political, religious, or tribal axe to grind. The long back road to China takes the rescue troop across ice fields, up cliffs, down valleys, and through some of the least inviting human settlements outside tsarist Siberia. Non-climatic dangers include the Indian secret service, spooky lamas, and Richard Nixon's new diplomacy. And vultures. Overlong and relentlessly glum, knee-deep in nihilism, but the scenery--frozen as it is--is fresh. The Tibetan political and religious scenery is repellent but also interesting.

Pub Date: March 23, 1990

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990

Categories: FICTION