Memoir: The interesting story here is not Tim Guest's but that of his mother, writes Keith Ridgway
There is a remarkable determination in Tim Guest's memoir that he tell his own story, and nobody else's. It is understandable, I suppose, that a writer who in his middle childhood lived in a community where his precious toys were pooled with those of other children, would want to reclaim his individuality and to assert himself. In his insistence to be at all times at the centre of this strange tale, however, he gives us a book which is far less engaging or interesting than it might have been.
Guest relates how, in 1979, when he is three years old, his mother stumbles upon the teachings of the Indian guru, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. Already living in a communal house, after years of political and broad religious exploration, she becomes intrigued and gradually won over to Bhagwan's liberal, optimistic pick-'n'-mix of Indian philosophy, western psychology and orange clothing. With a new name, she departs for Bombay, leaving the infant Guest behind in Leeds with his father: I wanted to go with her. Unfortunately, because this is a memoir, I wasn't allowed to.
There is a simmering resentment at the heart of this book, a resentment at being left behind, ignored, not sufficiently cared for. It is a resentment which I began to feel myself as things progressed. For the interesting story here is not Guest's but his mother's. She returns to England, and then goes back to Pune, home of Bhagwan himself, with the infant Guest. There she undergoes training, attempts to lose her ego, meditates wildly. She is sent back to England to set up a meditation centre.
Over the next several years she plays a central role in bringing this bizarre experiment in living - invented by a man with an addiction to Rolls Royces - to a wider world. It must be a fascinating story. But it's not really the story we get. What we get instead is a kind of child-minding stint, in loco parentis, to a young, resentful Timmy, or Yogesh, as he is renamed, watching over him as he plays his interminable games, runs around having misadventures, fancies girls, wets his bed and misses his mother. His mother who, I might add, never seems to be very far away.
It is obvious that rather than coming from his own memories, most of the factual detail we get (all the good stuff, in other words) must come from adult conversations with his mother. But he never actually tells us this.
We get glimpses of the "nothing is taboo" philosophy towards group sessions where alcohol, drugs and often violence are seen as useful tools along the path towards enlightenment. We hear, later on, funny and weird stories about his mother's attempts to get into George Bush senior's London hotel room in an effort to persuade the US to grant Bhagwan a visa. At the beginning we hear fleetingly the astonishing fact of her sterilisation - to keep the sexual flow unimpeded apparently. And at the end we are allowed a vague impression of what must have been an almost unbearable grief as her world collapsed in arrests, book burnings and embarrassment. But all of this comes to us coldly, almost grudgingly, as a distraction from the memoir, from the central concern, of a small boy and his impatience with a set of rather eccentric adults.
This is all his memoir can offer us. Guest is between six and 10 during most of the duration of the narrative. Furthermore, Bhagwan instructed that none of the children of his followers should be taught or schooled in his beliefs. So the person from whose perspective we are expected to view all of these things doesn't actually have a perspective to offer us. Reading the book becomes increasingly a salvage exercise, plucking the interesting from the swamp of the banal.
There are interesting things here, though, if frustratingly sketchy: the story of the cult's descent - in Oregon of all places - into militaristic paranoia on a huge scale; the matriarchy of the "Big Mamas", who sideline Bhagwan, get themselves some Uzis, and experiment with HIV-infected blood in secret underground tunnels; their attempt to poison an entire town with smears of salmonella at eight different restaurant salad bars; Bhagwan's attempted flight and arrest; the sale of his 93 Rolls Royces. But all this, in Guest's book, is nowhere near as interesting as his conviction that his mother should have spent less time trying to be a better person, and more time being a better mother.
At the end of it I liked her a lot, and him not at all. My Life In Orange is a book which testifies ineloquently to our current obsession with personal testimony. A publisher these days would much prefer the personal account to the comprehensive one. They should have asked the mother.
Keith Ridgway's most recent book, The Parts, is now available in paperback from Faber and Faber
My Life In Orange. By Tim Guest, Granta, 301pp. £12