When British author Tim Guest was still a small boy in the late '70s and early '80s, his smart, accomplished, but spiritually adrift mother gave up her old life, dyed her clothes the colors of the sun, and decided to devote herself to Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, a shadowy spiritual leader selling a seductive amalgamation of Eastern meditation, unabashed capitalism, and trippy New Age conceits. Unlike many fringe religious organizations, Bhagwan's followers were not typical gullible young outcasts; they were older, often college-educated professionals nevertheless willing to surrender themselves completely to the whims of an eccentric spiritual charlatan with a fleet of Rolls Royces and a weakness for lecturing while zonked out on laughing gas. So why would ostensibly sophisticated people leave their skepticism at the door and blindly follow such a questionable teacher?
As Guest suggests in My Life In Orange, his ingratiating account of life as a small fry in Bhagwan's army, the golden guru wasn't selling anything his mother and her fellow searchers weren't already eager to buy. Where the Catholicism of Guest's mother's childhood depicted a sinful world rife with damning temptations, Bhagwan's teachings delivered a sort of cosmic green, a hearty "yes" to all the forbidden pleasures of sex, drugs, and making money. At least that's how it was in the beginning, before Bhagwan's utopia devolved into a gruesome orgy of bugging, paranoia, AIDS, corruption, and sinister plots.
Orange tells the story of Guest's upbringing as pint-sized collateral damage in his mother's quest for truth. Though writing through decades of hindsight, Guest speaks convincingly from the perspective of a lost little boy trying to make sense of the chaos and randomness of his vagabond existence, as he and his mother bounce from country to country and continent to continent per the whims of the Bhagwan and his lieutenants. Where a lot of memoirists would play the surreal juxtapositions of Guest's childhood for dark comedy, he instead opts for earnest drama, laying out the jagged emotions of his traumatic upbringing in unadorned prose that is simultaneously one of the book's great strengths and its biggest weakness. Since Guest's younger self was at the periphery of the movement's dark descent, a lot of the book is devoted to mundanely chronicling his childhood games and diversions, which can get a little dull. Still, Guest's emotional approach ultimately pays off in a moving ending that achieves a catharsis that doesn't seem forced or phony. Guest endured a horrific childhood, but he emerged from it with a generous, empathetic spirit that pervades every page of this impressive story about coming of age while his world came apart.