Frank Lauria (1935–2022)

Raga Six is the second of Frank Lauria's Doctor Orient novels. The protagonist is just sufficiently removed from Marvel Comics' Doctor Strange to dodge trademark litigation. Owen Orient has an alliterative name, fame as a medical practitioner, a mansion in New York City, and training in esoteric sciences from Tibet. I found this second volume significantly less campy than the original Doctor Orient. There was nothing about the goddess Urvashi in this one, but the encounter with a sheikh in Marrakesh who superintended Orient's "expansion to the second level" was a high point of the book. Orient's parapsychological studies are relevant in this book, but occultism is even more to the fore.

The first third of the book takes place in New York, followed by episodes on a transatlantic voyage, adventures in north Africa, a climax in Rome, and denouement back in New York. The pacing is unusual, with Orient dispossessing himself of all his worldly assets and accomplishments at the outset. He falls in with hippies, and the first third of the book could have almost stood alone as he eventually arranges a coercive exorcism to break up a little black magic cult. (This subplot was left strangely incomplete, in that there was no follow-up regarding the well-being of the girl whose peril initially led him to explore the group.) Chapter 9 (out of 28) is a vivid occult murder, which at that point seems rather loosely connected to the plot of the novel, with Orient absent. This chapter is where the story pivots to his international voyage, though.

Orient is less healthy and less confident in Raga Six than in the prior volume, but he is more amorously accomplished, bedding nearly every desirable woman he encounters. There's no editorial condemnation of this behavior, but it is evidently not to his full advantage. "Raga Six," the reader learns shortly before the midpoint of the novel, is the name of a character, the wife of the menacing Doctor Alistar Six, and she becomes the object of Orient's chief romantic affair.

There are several major plot turns, none of which are especially surprising, but Lauria manages to sustain enough ambiguity about the real state of affairs that the reader can experience some real suspense. I did enjoy this book, and I'd read another in the series. There are seven!… (mehr)

I read Doctor Orient hoping for pretty much what I got: The Devil Rides Out with discotheques. The title character Dr. Owen Orient has something of a Doctor Strange background, with some vague past training in Tibetan occultism, but the focus of his abilities is on telepathy, and he prefers a parapsychological idiom to an occultist one. I don't much favor the hyperspace gobbledygook that Orient and author Lauria use to describe parapsychological phenomena, so it was a relief that the book's events are trained on the occult as a result of the Satanist villain (who goes by "Susej"!) and Orient's exorcistic ally the Roman Catholic Bishop Redson.

The fourth chapter (out of twenty-five) features a Satanic initiation straight out of the pages of Dennis Wheatley's 1960 novel The Satanist, except with better fashion sense, and with more language from Aleister Crowley's Gnostic Mass. In addition to using Thelema as a model for his fictional Satanism, Lauria seems also to draw on Scientology, with the devotional focus of the Satanists being the "Clear Power."

Much of the novel is told (in the third person) from the perspective of Orient or his fellow psychics, which creates some rather incoherently impressionistic passages, to the point where I wondered once if there had been editing errors disrupting the continuity. But this technique works pretty well in the book's climax, with a hallucinatory confrontation between Orient and Susej.

There are references throughout to a larger drama including Orient's earlier incarnations and relationships in that context, with special reference to the goddess Urvashi, but these remain fairly unexplained even at the end of the novel. I understand that Lauria went on to write several sequels, so I imagine that these features get explored further there. (Better that than the parapsychology!) I'm not scrambling to get my hands on the rest of the series, but if the next one falls in my lap, I'll read it.… (mehr)