Buddhism: In 1982, Peter Conradi was suffering from acute anxiety. It was, he writes, "an occupation, a career. I could have majored in fear". This fear, and a sustained number of panic attacks prompted by everything from global terrorism to public transport ("I hyper-ventilated into a paper bag to calm down"), constituted the crisis that led him to Buddhism, writes Breffni O'Malley.
Finding the writings of Tibetan Buddhist Chögyam Trungpa on a bookshelf one day, Conradi's epiphany was swift and all-consuming; "I read it at a single, tearful sitting . . . I'd found a teacher."
Since then, Conradi has led numerous month-long Buddhist retreats, spent weeks meditating in the Colorado Rockies and, most recently, been invited as a guest to Bhutan, "the last Tibetan Buddhist kingdom on earth". A respected biographer and academic, Conradi is perhaps uniquely placed to describe his spiritual journey, and there are moments when his talents and experience coalesce to provide a unique glimpse of Buddhism's beauty and poetry.
He is especially good on meditation, likening it to "a protective glass sheath being put around a wildly guttering candle, so that the flame of awareness can burn more brightly". Elsewhere he asserts that it "makes nothing happen at all except to slow one down, so that one can witness how one always was, but never before quite saw".
Yet too often, taking up this book is like walking into a lecture halfway through. The tone is digressive, the narrative disorientated. In one sample sequence of pages, for example, we are given Conradi's personal view of meditation, a brief history of Chinese involvement in Tibet, Iris Murdoch's view of Tibet, and a summary of its "entire culture".
In another, Buddhism's broad doctrinal splits are jarringly explained in the midst of a personal contemplation on spiritual emptiness. The effect is bewildering.
More fundamentally, Conradi largely fails to record the impact Buddhism has on his own world, his everyday life. Instead, his new spiritualism is filtered through an alternative source: Iris Murdoch. Conradi was Murdoch's biographer as well as a close friend, and consequently you might expect some degree of reference to her. What you might not expect, however, is quite as much reference. Almost everything Conradi reads or experiences - from Tibetan history to meditation or the Buddhist notion of positive emptiness - is interpreted through her novels, lectures, characters or correspondence. She even receives her own chapter, 'Talking to Iris' (notably longer than others such as 'Basic Buddhism' and 'Buddhism Goes West').
Such focus, although articulate and even understandable ("she was always my teacher," he admits), is misplaced. Too frequently, Conradi substitutes his own experience with a novelistic comparison or a reference to a letter, conversation or remark. The result is alienating rather than illuminating. On this personal journey, while two's company, three is definitely a crowd.
Conradi claims that all "stories" are problematic, there is something odd, perhaps fake, about making the meditative path into a "story" - and perhaps it is this belief that leads him to omit so much of his own experience. Yet when he delves into it at the end of the book, the effect is dramatic. The story of his first month-long group retreat is funny and affecting. His description of his visit to Bhutan - a mixture of anecdote, reflection, Buddhist teaching and personal experience - is among the most memorable passages in the book.
Self-consciously billed as a "self-help book for cynics", in reality Going Buddhist is no such thing. In part, this is welcome - that this is no Dharma for Dummies, full of quick-fix credos and cheat sheets, counts as a blessing in any religion. Less welcome, however, is that Conradi does not cater to the cynic. Instead, he is too much the eager Buddhist, too much Murdoch's disciple. While one may have helped him illuminate the other, it does little to stop the rest of us losing our religion.
Breffni O'Malley is a freelance journalist
Going Buddhist: Panic and Emptiness, the Buddha and Me. By Peter J. Conradi, Short Books, 183pp. £9.99