Traveling the long, winding road back to square one

This short novel is centered round what may be life's most fundamental question. Given that we only have a certain number of years to live, how should we best spend our time?

Philosophers have looked at this question with surprising infrequency. Perhaps they were concerned with other issues, knotty but fascinating problems such as how we can know whether what our senses tell us is the truth. Or perhaps they believed in the possibility of an afterlife -- a belief that certainly takes the edge off the big question outlined above. This novel, although it's told in the third person, looks at life entirely through the eyes of one individual. He's a successful businessman, surrounded by his family and friends, affluent, well-respected and without any obvious problems. Nevertheless, one fine morning, having created another identity and transferred some of his funds to this new persona, he writes a note to his wife, catches a train, and is never heard of again by any of them.

The purpose of this action is to find the things in life that he's missed. There must be more to existence than making money, siring a family, and so on. So the old man -- he's never given a name, just called "the old man" -- sets out to see what these other things might be.

Goh Poh Seng was born in Singapore, trained as a doctor, and began his life as a writer there. But then he fell out with the authorities -- the details of what happened aren't clear -- and emigrated to Canada. There he at first set up a medical practice in a remote location in Newfoundland, but has now returned to city life.

Dance with White Clouds is clearly set in Malaysia, where the old man travels to from Singapore in the early pages. The description of the landscape, the food, the population, plus the few hours spent in the capital, establish this unambiguously. Not that it really matters where the book is set. This is a fable, and indeed its subtitle is "A fable for grown ups." The subject of its inquiry -- what a wise man should do with a life -- is a universal one, and applies to us all.

As a quest fable, this book follows in the footsteps of some illustrious predecessors. Two notable earlier books that attempted to confront the same question both date from the 18th century -- Voltaire's Candide and Johnson's Rasselas (each published, as it happens, in the same year, 1759). Both of these books had a central character traveling in search of the meaning of life, or rather the best way of living it. Comparisons with Dance with White Clouds are illuminating. The most interesting feature that all three books have in common is that none of their protagonists finds what he's looking for. The second point of similarity is that they're all relatively short narratives. Presumably the quest for an ideal doesn't readily permit sub-plots, the usual means by which works of fiction are spun out to more than moderate length.

These points apart, this Asian quest novel is rather different. In both Rasselas and Candide the format is that the hero visits different kinds of people -- nature-lovers, scientists, philosophers and so on -- in the hope of finding which of them is truly happy. Of course it isn't simply a question of happiness. Voltaire and Johnson were nothing if not thinking people, and neither of them could have been happy if they didn't believe they were living in the wisest possible way. Nevertheless, their heroes both traveled in search of the best way of life, and both came to the conclusion that no one they visited was either happy or enlightened. Best to stay at home and cultivate your garden, Voltaire decided.