Peacemongers (Barry Hill, UQP)

This is an immense book in length, content and quality, and a journey well worth taking. Barry Hill has combined a travel narrative with a meditation on history and peace. In the beginning, he visits Bodh Gaya in India, where the Buddha sought enlightenment under the Bodhi Tree. A Buddhist himself, Hill has a spiritual companion on his tour: his late father, a unionist and peace activist. Hill follows in the physical and spiritual footsteps of Rabindrath Tagore, one of India’s pre-eminent thinkers and writers of the 20th century, and the first Asian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Tagore had a sense of himself as a pilgrim, travelling ‘further to be oneself’, and in 1916 he visited Japan, a country for which he initially had high hopes. Hill reflects on both Tagore’s and his own thoughts on the horrors of war. Peacemongers is a book that challenges the failure of contemporary Western ‘progressive’ thought. It is a book that I wanted to re-read immediately, both to understand more about Tagore’s ideas but also to enjoy again the depth and quality of Hill’s thoughts and writing.

Chris Harrington is the co-owner of Books in Print in Melbourne

Category: Reviews