It was his poems that won him the Nobel Prize, but they were barely even half the story. "By the sanctity of his life and character", the Chief Justice of India announced, Tagore had "won for himself the praise of all mankind". His myriad-mindedness was evident: no mere poet, he was also a musician "famous in his art", an upholder of learning and doctrine, a defender of liberties and a philosopher. He was, to cut it short, the Indian Renaissance man, a judgement amply borne out by this biography. Indeed, it turns out that the phrase itself derives from an official encomium, delivered on the awarding to Tagore of an honorary Oxford doctorate in 1940. Even their subtitle - "The Myriad-minded Man" - smacks of a pre-emptive strike, claiming admiration for their subject before he has earned it.

In Europe his reputation was once stratospheric, but now we rarely bother. In India, on the other hand, his stock still is extraordinarily high - so high, indeed, that one Bengali critic could recently write that "no man in the whole range of known history can rival Tagore's all- comprehending genius, equally splendid in thought, in creation, and in action." The authors of this biography, one suspects, adhere privately to the Bengali view, however much they try not to let it show. Philip Larkin was once asked for his considered opinion of the great poet Rabindranath Tagore. "An Indian has written to ask me", he wrote to a friend, "what I think of Rabindrum Tagore: feel like sending him a telegram, `FUCK ALL LARKIN' ". There was always, of course, a savage edge to Larkin's indifference, but it seems likely that here he was stating the accepted, and still prevalent, view of Tagore. Here the meaning is, for once, implicit in the gaps, the suspensions and omissions of the text, reminding us of the power of what Willa Cather called "the inexplicable presence of the thing not named, of the overtone divined by the ear but not heard by it".Jason Cowley.

The tension between them crackles like a wire; we know that he desires her.This is the best moment of the novel precisely because Amidon withdraws from it and refuses to editorialise - and, consequently, we can respond to the lovers' inchoate sexual stirrings. There is for instance, a lovely moment of tenderness when, early in their relationship, David washes Sara's hair Her warm, serious voice, tinged with sadness, delights him He moves towards her and pulls her into an embrace. He is fatally addicted to overstatement, refusing to leave his characters alone. He forces them to speak aloud in order to reveal their motivation. This is a typical sentence: "Man, what the fuck are you going to do? David asked himself out loud." Yet when Amidon relaxes his stranglehold on the story, and steps back from the action, the novel breathes.Suddenly, there is room and time enough for the characters to move independently.