An Indian Odyssey, By Martin Buckley

An Indian Odyssey is a meditation on the mysteries of life masquerading as a rollicking road-trip. This is a post-theological divine comedy, in which the shattered remains of the Inferno and Paradiso are shaken together in a profane cocktail. But flashes of ecstasy keep breaking through as Martin Buckley heroically works his way through the carnal to the divine.

His journey scatters girlfriends around like breadcrumbs. Buckley is sought out by local girls anxious to relieve themselves of their virginity without acquiring a reputation. Among fellow nomads, he swings between Birgitte, a dogmatic German Marxist, and the transcendental but erotic Australian, Liz. Even though he dreams of bumping into God in some Himalayan Shangri-La, Buckley is even-handedly sceptical towards both hardcore atheists and gurus.

India, in Buckley's account, becomes a tumbling riot of brothels, beggars, bombs, road-accidents, Bhopal, bribes, caste, cloacae, temples, everywhere temples, and actual riots. It's like a gigantic market-place in which thousands of different gods are on offer and there is cut-throat competition for customers. The more heaven, the more hell.

Woven into his own epic adventures is Buckley's raunchy and believable abridgment of the epic Ramayana, worthy of Vikram Seth, which for the first time gave me a clear sense of who is who and what the hell is going on in this dark labyrinth of narrative. Perhaps, like all great texts, it is in turns inspiring, ennobling, sublime, and sexist, racist and fascist. Out of all its myriad forms there emerges a governing trope of tall, pale-skinned northerners crushing smaller, darker-skinned southerners, which gets tangled up in the Sri Lankan civil war and other assorted conflicts.

Buckley is a mystic existentialist. One of his first quasi-religious experiences occurs when he becomes conscious of his own hand, observing himself from the outside. The sense of divine inter-connectedness seems to arise out of the sensual contemplation of the body, especially someone else's. The repressive side of religion is therefore a kind of denial of its origin. One of Buckley's many funny lines: "I was pursuing not Buddhism but orgasm – not the ineffable but the effable", turns out to be a cunning red-herring. Buckley is pursuing both with the same kind of lyrical intensity and urgency.