While George Crane's first book "The Bones of the Master" was centered on his unique, funny and instructive relationship with the Mongolian expatriate monk Tsung Tsai, and for this reason assumed the shape of a disciple and master or to better put it a "buddy" book, this second work does not have a leading guide because we only briefly encounter Tsung Tsai at the beginning of the book. However, "Georgie" is always in search of buddies and so, leaving his routinary life in which things are not going so well, continues his encounters with rouges and border-line personalities. He travels to Key Largo, Paris and fatefully ends up in Mongolia, where fascinated by a name, that is actually a remote locality on the Winding Road (remember Owen Lattimore's The Desert Road to Turkistan), the House of the False Lama, he puts his heart in peace for what we know wont be long. I think he is now writing his third novel somewhere in Greece.
This book is a delightful read but it deserves a cultural background to be fully appreciated and is written for middle age men and women. Only some points to reflect on: the Author's knowledge of Zen helps to put happenings and feelings in an ironic and off-hand perspective and many of his themes are very Zen indeed. The trip that is more important than the destination is one of the many subjects he dwells upon. The Zen culture is evident also in his poetry and style, that is choppy and lyrical at the same time. For those that remember Kant's "sublime", it is evident that Crane's deepest feelings and strongest emotions are awakened during a tempest or in the majestic scenario of the Gobi Desert and in these cases his poetic prose really reaches its best results. But indipendently of these peaks, the underlying thematic is his ageing and humanity in the sense of his unquenchable desire for women and love and the confort he gains from alcohol and smoke and drugs(?), like all people in this world. Naturally he is overindulgent with himself but in such a captivating way that we really feel he is a friend.
I saw the previous reviewer focused his title on the False Lame, who is the False lama? Tsung Tsai that hasn't given the appropriate answers? The Author, that has no superior knowledge to convey? All the myths we live by? Or is just that place in that peculiar moment?
A book to enjoy, to savour and appreciate with all our senses. Looking forward to number three !

It's not really until the last few pages of George Crane's Beyond the House of the False Lama that one begins to realize just what he has accomplished with this latest effort. And that the extraordinary regret that the book was nearly over would give way to the joy of reading it again and again. For Crane does not just journey to the Caribbean, Paris, Mongolia--(and particularly to the mountain range where legend says the wind is born)--but also to those intricate, exotic locales of the heart where love and poetry are birthed out of the pressure of guilt and the panic of life just beyond one's fingertips.
Where other authors gun their literary engines to race through the plot, dragging the reader by either the ear or collar to a predictable ending, Crane not only lingers to smell the emotional flowers but he bids us bend down and examine the very ground and dig a bit into the roots. And what roots! His eye for detail and the connection between soil and art, caresses and relationship, is both unerring and instructive, especially when it comes to describing a chance encounters.
Crane writes the way great photographers capture light, with a deft attention to detail and the meticulous framing of each moment, with a piece of the action traveling off the page, allowing the mind to follow, fill-in what is left unsaid, undescribed. The physical sensations and his emotional emanations reverberate throughout the book via his purling, susurrating prose that both delights the mind and invokes presence and participation. Just as in Bones of the Master, this new effort is the tale of a failed journey, and as such, it makes the book that much more accessible, that much more successful. For, like Crane, we are ultimately all False Lamas seeking our own inner truth.