On a Sundown Sea: A Novel of Madame Tingley and the Origins of Lomaland
On a Sundown Sea is the story of one of the early figures of the Theosophical Society in America, Katherine Tingley (1847-1929), and especially of her founding of Lomaland, an idyllic haven of arts, meditation, and brotherhood in southern California around the turn of the previous century. A woman with a checkered past, married to a charming, ne’er-do-well inventor, Katherine is serving as a social worker (and fortune teller) in New York when the book begins, but a meeting with William Q. Judge, one of the pillars of Theosophy in Europe after Madame Blavatsky, the founder herself, changes the course of the American woman’s life. Her relationship with Judge heats up, but he soon dies, leaving her anointed as his successor. Not everyone in the Society is willing to buy into this, and the rest of the story deals primarily with their opposition and backbiting, over which Katherine triumphs to found the paradisal colony of which she has dreamed since childhood. Literally.
This book would have been much more interesting had the author attempted to imagine the psychological motives of this important figure in the cultural history of the early 20th century. Instead, Katherine and all her fellow Theosophists seem to operate on the basis of veritable dreams and visions. For unbelievers, this credulous assumption on the part of the author turns the tale into fantasy. Add to that amateurish prose and a tendency to spout factoids, and it was hard to finish.
