This is part of a chapter-by-chapter review of Robin Sharma’s ‘The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari’. All posts will be linked back to the first post in this review, here.

Chapter Two: The Mysterious Visitor

The next morning, at an emergency meeting of the law firm, Narrator and colleagues are told that Julian suffered a severe heart attack, is still in ICU although stable, and has decided to give up law. That seems a very quick timescale for making a permanent decision about something this important. I initially thought that surely the partners would at least urge him to wait until he’d recovered before giving a final answer, but, given the way his legal acumen had apparently deteriorated over the years as described towards the end of the last chapter, I’m now headcanoning that they jumped at the chance of getting him out of there.

Narrator is not only shocked at the news, but deeply hurt that Julian didn’t tell him this ‘personally’. There’s a rather unpleasant whiff of entitlement about the expectation that your work colleague should discuss their life decisions with you personally (not to mention the practicality of exactly how he thinks Julian would have done this while seriously ill in hospital), but it’s also somewhat sad, when you think about it. Here’s someone with so little experience of friendship that he sees the time he spends with a work colleague as equivalent to a close friendship and assumes they’re on the level of confiding in each other about important decisions. And then he’s hurt when he finds the work colleague didn’t see things that way at all.

On this topic, Narrator also complains that Julian won’t let Narrator see him in the hospital:

Every time I dropped by, the nurses had been instructed to tell me that he was sleeping and could not be disturbed.

Sharma seems to have overlooked the fact that he’s gone for a personal and not an omniscient narrator, who would have no way of knowing if this was in fact something the nurses had just been ‘instructed’ to say rather than the truth. This means that Narrator just comes across as poutily paranoid here.

We then learn that all of this has been a flashback to events ‘just over three years ago’. Narrator gives us a quick update on those three years, and, oh, yes, we get this:

My dad said it best when he said “John, on your deathbed you will never wish you spent more time at the office.”

Aha; Narrator’s name is John! I’ll use that going forward. As for the sentiment, that saying always makes me wonder ‘How would anyone know that?’. I’m guessing nobody’s ever taken a survey of what dying people think of the matter.

Meanwhile, here’s what happened during those years:

• Julian sells his stuff, thus giving us our book title, and heads off on a quest to India because it’s a ‘mystical land’ where he hopes to find some ‘answers’. Because naturally that’s the best way that an experienced lawyer can look for meaning in life. (Hello, Julian? You know what’s a great way of finding meaning in life? Helping others. Such as, say, the very many people who are being screwed over by the rich and powerful and could desperately do with pro bono representation.)
• John goes from an ‘overworked young lawyer’ to a ‘jaded, somewhat cynical older lawyer’. That timescale doesn’t quite work. I looked back and, indeed, the first chapter stated that John had known Julian for seventeen years, starting as an intern when he was in law school. That means he’s been a practicing lawyer for fifteen or sixteen years at this point (depending on whether this internship was the summer between first and second year or second and third year at the law school) and, if he went through law school at the normal age, would have been 40 or 41 by the time of Julian’s heart attack. He’d already moved on from the ‘young lawyer’ stage.
• He and his wife (Jenny; Robin Sharma does seem to love his J-names) have children. Again, this doesn’t fit well with the timeline; he married Jenny before he went to law school, so this means they left it until she was in her late 30s to have children. Not impossible, but this all does sound very much as though Sharma had just forgotten all about having specified seventeen years in the first chapter and is now picturing John and Jenny as having still been a youngish couple at the time of Julian’s heart attack. I do wish people would proofread. (People probably wish I would stop nitpicking.)
• Having children inspires John to begin his own ‘search for meaning’, although this doesn’t seem to get that far; he just spends ‘a little more time at home’. He also joins the Rotary Club and plays golf on Saturdays ‘to keep my partners and clients happy’, which doesn’t sound like much of a search for meaning. (It also doesn’t sound like much fun for his wife. Unless they have a full-time nanny, sounds like she’s stuck doing a lot more than her share of the childcare.)

Which all brings us, apparently, to ‘two months ago’. John’s assistant Genevieve (all right, not a J, but same sound) tells him that someone has turned up insisting on speaking with him urgently. John, who’s had a long hard day and is on his way to a quick dinner before coming back to do yet more work, is not pleased with this and tells her that the visitor can make an appointment like everyone else, but apparently the visitor ‘refuses to take no for an answer’ and John relents.

The visitor is, of course, Julian, but John doesn’t recognise him at first because he’s changed so much. He now appears to be in his mid-thirties (for those checking the details, this means that having previously been so worn out that he looked more than twenty years older than his actual age, he now looks more than twenty years younger than his actual age), he looks amazing and full of energy to the point of reminding John of the golden kids from well-off families with whom he went to law school, and he has ‘an underlying peacefulness’ that gives him ‘an almost divine presence’.

We also get my favourite line in what I’ve read of this book so far:

Piercing blue eyes that sliced clear through me like a razor meeting the supple flesh of a fresh-faced adolescent anxious about his first shave.

Right up there with the Bulwer-Lyttons for style. I will forever find it delightfully and irrationally hilarious.

Anyway, Julian stands there looking at John ‘much as the smiling Buddha might have looked upon a favoured pupil’ (though the Buddha probably didn’t get accidental beheading similes), which weirds John out to the point where he’s wondering whether he should call security (although a few paragraphs later we’re assured that Julian exudes such serenity that John feels ‘entirely peaceful’ with him). John does recognise him when he starts speaking; at which point, in my second-favourite line so far, he’s described as having a ‘raspy, honey-smooth voice’. C’mon, Sharma, you were just pulling adjectives out at random at that point, weren’t you?

The chapter ends with another long description of Julian’s amazing transformation, and then it’s done. Short chapters! I like it.