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my update on Blown by the Same Wind, by John Straley

The photo above is one of my favourite shots of Thomas Merton, the Cistercian Monk whose memoir The Seven Storey Mountain was a bestseller during the period in which John Straley set his novel, Blown by the Same Wind.

It’s a crime novel, of sorts, and a murder mystery, kind of. The book is rooted in mid-twentieth century American and World History. The Viet Nam War, the My Lai Massacre, the assasinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and the Kennedy brothers, as well as the virulent anti-communist propaganda of the time all feature in the story.

Merton actually did visit Alaska before he went to Southeast Asia in 1968. He did not go to Cold Storage, because it’s a place that exists mainly in Straley’s poetic imagination. Even so, the Brother Louis who visits this Alaskan fishing town does bear some resemblance to the Merton in the photo above.

It seems like Straley did his research, or at least has read some of the same works by and about Thomas Merton that I have. He explored Merton’s inner life in a way that was both respectful, and satisfying, as he points to resolution, or the hope of resolution of several of the turmoils he lived with. Straley knows about Merton’s father the painter, his brother John Paul who died in military service in World War 2, and “M”, the nurse with whom the monk had a significant relationship. He also seems to know about the child Merton is rumoured to have fathered during his brief, disastrous time as a dissolute student at Cambridge.

I also quite enjoyed the section of the novel given over to the monk leading the other main characters (excepting the “villains” and their victim) on a journey up a mountain, on the promise of an experience of the “absence of God”. Straley’s poetic prose shone in this section, and revealed that he knows something about the path of unknowing.

I won’t “spoil” the read for those who have not got there yet, but I will say the solution to the murderous aspect of the novel happens in a way that is satisfying within the story, and also met my expectations as an admirer of Merton. It (the reveal about the crime) also happens where it needed to happen, in Dharamshala, ahead of the monk’s meeting with the Dalai Lama.