His Master's voice

This book is an account of five years that Louis Brawley spent in the wake of thinker and &lsquonon-teacher&rsquo U.G. Krishnamurti. These were years spent in travel, from the USA to India and across Europe. The more usual description of this constancy would be &lsquowaiting upon one&rsquos master&rsquo but given the informality of this particular interaction, it is strictly more like &lsquohanging about&rsquo.

So then, Brawley hangs around &mdash and tells us about it at a level of detail commonly classified under &lsquoexcruciating&rsquo. We are eager to know what motivates anyone to drop their lives, and take off after another person. Surely there is passion involved, deep commitment, or at least a strong compulsion But Brawley gives us no satisfactory insight into his own motivations. We learn that he sought out Jiddu Krishnamurti in his search for a Guru and then left him to follow U.G. Krishnamurti, a curious echo of what U.G. himself did he had spent seven years with Jiddu before leaving him, frustrated with what he called his &lsquoabstractions&rsquo. So U.G. and Brawley are bonded by a common rejection. However, once we get past this interesting starting point, the narrative grows at once bizarre and tedious, if you can imagine such a combination.

The journey takes us to many places but we get only small, occasional glimpses of them &mdash mostly we get inexhaustible minutiae about U.G. and the people gathered around him. Names crop up repeatedly but we get no idea of who they are. Brawley obsesses through the book about his on&ndashoff relationship with Yogini, another disciple. Of U.G. himself, a portrait emerges of an irascible old man, given to tongue-lashing, full of provocative repartee and profound presence.

The interactions are farcical. U.G. makes Brawley perform a series of absurd sketches for his gatherings &mdash sometimes imitations, once a demonstration of &lsquotantric sex-mongering&rsquo techniques. We are taken aback with scenes of U.G. hitting him repeatedly and occasionally force-feeding him bananas and sweets. The book ends with U.G.&rsquos death in Italy leaving Brawley to write this scattered journal that conveys no coherent sense of this man&rsquos life or his final years.