With The Tiger is a re-writing of Somerset Maugham’s still-in-print 1944 novel The Razor’s Edge. The main characters, including the narrator, are 60-years-later versions of Maugham’s, Australians rather than Americans in Europe. Maugham’s narrative skeleton and structure are followed. The re-writing entails themes of both change and timelessness in (as well as contemporary versions of) the issues inherent in the main story, including the Westerner’s various experience of India. In my version, Larry goes to India long before he does in the earlier novel: his early life-changing experience is a teenage back-packing trip to India, not an under-age enlistment in World War One, and his first travels as a seeker are there, too, not in Europe. He returns to India several times at different stages of his search, spending time in a fashionable ashram, a Buddhist monastery, among political activists, looking at art, and so on, up to his final appearance.
