Jacob Atabet: A speculative fiction

by Michael Murphy

A spiritual thriller by the bestselling author of Golf in the KingdomAs publisher, writer, and researcher, Darwin Fall has gathered a wide range of evidence for human nature’s supernormal capacitiesâ but his photographs and case stories can only take him so far. He needs living proof. So when a mysterious man named Jacob Atabet disturbs morning mass at a Catholic church in his neighborhood, Fall thinks he may have found just what he’s looking for, setting in motion a quest that leads him to push beyond the limits of his own imagination. Defying categorization, Michael Murphy artfully maneuvers through the shoals of fiction, science, self-knowledge, and invention.

Genres: Science Fiction

216 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1977

About the author

Bestselling author Michael Murphy has been called the father of the human potential movement, one of the most influential movements in twentieth-century American culture. His bestselling book Golf in the Kingdom (1972) inspired the creation of the Shivas Irons Society, a nonprofit group dedicated to finding beauty and discovery through the game of golf, and has recently been adapted into a movie starring Malcolm McDowell (2010). His other books include Jacob Atabet (1977), An End to Ordinary History (1982), In the Zone (1995), and The Kingdom of Shivas Irons (1997). He lives in California.

Reviews

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first read Jacob Atabet circa 1980, a few years after its publication, at a time when my awareness and attention was opening to understanding of a world beyond reductive science and machine-measurable phenomenology. This novel served with many other books -- Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Pearce's Crack in the Cosmic Egg, the first four or so of Carlos Castaneda's novels -- to ignite a decades-long inquiry (ongoing) into how we apprehend what the world is (the most recent book I read in this vein was Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy, by the philosopher Evan Thompson).

Murphy's novel holds up in some respects -- the evocation of North Beach populated by artists, seekers, and intrigue, especially; but also its portrayal of the urge to seek, and the excitement among those beginning to crack the shibboleths that have reified the mind-body split, since Descartes and beyond.

I was surprised to find, though, how deeply Murphy coded his novel with references to authors and work I hadn't read by the time I first read Jacob Atabet. I hadn't remembered it that way. And I was surprised in part because the novel worked its magic on me nonetheless, despite the fact that I hadn't yet read Lawrence Durrell, or Eliot's "Four Quartets", or the Bhagavad Gita ... or many other breezily-glossed novelists, poets, physicists, and philosophers I still haven't gotten to (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Sri Aurobindo, David Bohm, Wilhelm Reich, etc., etc.). Murphy's thicket of casually-dropped names makes sense in the novel's frame: the story is a cobbled-together narration told by a bookish intellectual who owns a North Beach press and is trying to finish a 1723 page manuscript titled Evolutionary Relationships Between Mind and Body.

And so I look back on my first reading and see that what was important to me about this novel in my early twenties was its promise of a world of exploration through both reading and Practice (running and painting in Jacob Atabet; mine turned out to be Tai Chi Chuan). It was part of an opening, a start ... I didn't take it as The Answer, and that's not how it is intended. Hard to know how this novel would read to someone in their early twenties today, four decades after its publication. But it certainly had a beneficent effect on this reader those many years ago.

[Jerry Balzano]

Kindle version ... stalled at the 51% mark ... now thinking about finishing it. (2/21/12)