Blue Poppies

November 25, 2002
The American debut novel of Scottish playwright Falla is an intense tale of exile on a number of levels, involving bittersweet love, war, bravery, sacrifice and betrayal. In Jyeko, a town in a remote eastern province of Tibet in 1950, young Scottish adventurer Jamie Wilson, a WWII veteran, is hired to establish a radio outpost for Lhasa. Jamie is mesmerized by the stark beauty of Tibet and puzzled by its enigmatic people, who one moment are peace loving and religious, the next violent and barbarous. The cheery machinations of Buddhist monk Khenpo Nima link Jamie's fate with that of a young woman, Puton, and her daughter. Puton is considered unlucky both because of who she is, the widow of a hated tax collector, and because she is handicapped and walks with the aid of a stick. Hired by Khenpo Nima to be Jamie's housekeeper, Puton soon becomes his lover as well. After the Communist Chinese invade Tibet and establish a garrison in Jyeko, the uneasy truce between villagers and soldiers is upset by a brutal outbreak of violence, and the whole town must flee or face certain death. The townspeople refuse to allow Puton and her child to accompany them, and Jamie abandons her to her fate, but remains hopeful that he can somehow rescue her. The journey, which changes course a number of times, is harrowing, as the vagabond Tibetans time and again outwit the Chinese. Falla risks much in making Jamie a fallible, often selfish protagonist, and the detached coolness of his prose can be off-putting. At its best, however, the novel is as bracing as mountain air, and the heart-wrenching conclusion comes to seem inevitable.

January 1, 2003
In the mid-twentieth century, a youthful Scottish veteran named Jamie Wilson is dispatched to the Tibetan village of Jyeko. There he meets the young widow Puton, who is physically and emotionally scarred after being injured in the avalanche that killed her husband. The love story that follows is set against a landscape of astonishing geographical beauty. The author is adept at describing the nuances of human emotion as well as the intrigue of a mysterious part of the world: "The interminable complexity of the Himalayan ranges was heaped, peak after ridge after gorge, with snowfields shining in a palette of pale blues according to their angle in the sun." Wilson, though, has not been sent to Jyeko to meet his soul mate. His job is to set up a radio outpost. It is the radio transmitter that will bring dire news: the enemy, in the form of the Chinese army, is approaching. The tale then takes a picaresque turn before heading toward home in this satisfying and artful novel.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2003, American Library Association.)