THE POET IN EXILE

Morrison lives, more or less, in this first novel by the Doors co-founder and keyboardist.

Roy, a married man living in Los Angeles, receives a letter postmarked from the Seychelles Islands. He believes that the sender is Jordan, the former lead singer-lyricist for their old band, long thought dead from heart failure. Roy gets on a flight to the Islands, and, on the way, reminisces about the formation and commercial success of the unnamed band, and mostly about “the Poet,” as he usually refers to the lead singer, a charismatically masculine man with a bent for mysticism and alcohol. The Poet, it turns out, is indeed alive, and he and Roy are reunited. Long, rambling discussions follow as the Poet explains the circumstances behind his “death,” new life, and what he’s been up to all this time. It’s as you’d expect: tears of despair on the sandy shore, baptismal dips into Mother Ocean, and ultimately a trip to India, where the Poet explored Hindu and Buddhist thought. He went on a foothills-of-the-Himalaya quest to a village called Rishikesh, where “an angel,” a ten-year-old boy in a Led Zeppelin T-shirt, leads him to the ashram Sivananda. By the end of a recital that would have put any character except Roy to sleep, the Poet feels capable of returning to America and reuniting with his old band for a farewell tour. Fate, however, has other plans. This is the sort of story that perhaps only Manzarek would have been compelled to write, and maybe somewhere there’s an audience eager enough for fantasies of Morrison’s continued existence that it can forgive prose like “his chest swelled imperceptibly” and the kind of earnest, soulful stuff that makes most readers turn away in embarrassment.

A certain someone is surely spinning, as they say, in his grave.