The classic journey-adventures of the past, from [Frederick] Marryat and [Walter] Scott downwards, have most of them been journeys of body and spirit together: the most stringent and compelling accidents have their full effect when we can see how they have changed the protagonist other than by merely breaking his head. The divagating and dangerous journey taken [in Tulku] by Theodore Tewker into Tibet is, to outward appearance, a flight; surviving a Boxer raid on his father's mission in China, the boy attaches himself to chance-met travellers without any particular plan or hope. It is not for many months that he is able to admit that there was a pattern, mysterious and inexplicable, in his journeying…. [Safely] back in England, he admitted to himself that if "the foundations which Father had given him had been shaken", he had "discovered other foundations beneath, broader and more enduring", not by denying the value of the old Lama's teaching or reacting against his father, but by growing into himself.
It is difficult, for reviewer as for writer, to indicate this kind of growth without smudging the total effect of adventure-narrative, a genre which at its best should achieve the reader's belief in emotional change not through sermonising but through a passionate reality of character, action and place fused together, a veracity of detail so strong that he cannot fail to be drawn into the secondary world. Tulku is a most impressive and artfully wrought book. It has the outward trappings of a great adventure—an exotic setting of mountain, plateau and river, expert variations of pace and tension and strong character-drawing. (p. 3462)
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