The Man within My Head by Pico Iyer: review The Man Within My Head is an autobiography told through the places Iyer visits in Greene's conscious or coincidental steps; the very English institutions that have shaped him - in Iyer's case, the Dragon School, Eton and Oxford; and the stranded versions of himself and of his father that Iyer encounters on journeys far from home, wherever that is, to South America, Canada, Cuba, Sri Lanka, Vietnam. Iyer's father was an academic from Bombay who became president of the Oxford Union and went on to teach in California. Iyer grew up between cultures, accustomed to travelling and having to take the measure of what is lost when you're not committed. In Bhutan, Iyer read The Comedians - "the novel pinned me against the wall and asked the cost of watching from the sidelines." Greene's novels, he strongly believed, "were my unwritten autobiography," none more so than The Quiet American: "it was like a diagram of the world I knew, my boyhood." Greene's first and last novels feature boys running away. More acutely than anyone, Greene understood that brand of homesickness which Iyer (and I) felt at the age of nine at our Oxford preparatory school - of a young boy, with experience of heat and abroad, thrust like a spy into people who spoke the same language but who had never left Bardwell Road, as it were; and which, writ large, is every sentient adult's homesickness. All across the world, from Brighton to Saigon, we meet in his books a small group of boys, tied in a kind of fellowship and living in spartan quarters, very simply, clinging to their worn-out innocence as if they were still in the room called Pterodactyl. Greenelanders, as both Iyer and his mentor Inuit, are universal characters. Reading The Man Within My Head, I had the same disorienting frisson of recognition that Iyer describes on discovering The Quiet American in its orange-covered paperback edition. Because the last time I saw Iyer was in that selfsame dormitory named after a flying dinosaur, in the wood-creaking corridors of School House. Reduced to our initials, S P R Iyer and I sat in the same classroom, conjugated the same Greek verbs and cowered before the same masked dentist - an archetypal Greenean figure - in Beaumont Street. In puzzling out the magnetic and enduring tug of such institutions, Iyer tells his frankly baffled wife: "School was what we had instead of family." Iyer never met Greene. A polite refusal signed by Greene - in response to a passionate six-page letter that Iyer wrote from Bhutan requesting an interview - was burned to cinders in a Californian bush fire (in which Iyer likes to see parallels with the loss of Greene's London home during the Blitz). He does not claim to pin down his subject, and yet in not netting him, in keeping him free, he captures Greene's spirit - and calls on it to examine his character and life, in particular Iyer's relationship with his mediumistic father. It was only through another that you could see yourself with shocking clarity. What Iyer comes to see, with typical perception, is that The Quiet American "was a story, in the end, of fathers and sons." The unquiet Englishman Fowler, who is more compassionate than he lets on, and the quiet American Pyle, who is not so innocent as he pretends, are the same person at different stages of life - a father and son "who don't know how much to love each other and how much to compete." Iyer's father died aged 65. With Greene's assistance, Iyer turns in his mid-fifties to face him. It is the most humbling and moving section of his double homage. The author realises how much he is trapped in/founded on a pattern already established, and which the brass-rubbing that is writing has patiently revealed. The Man Within My Head is one of a handful of magical books that I have read straight through. On reaching the end, I immediately gave it to my father, with whom I first met Greene in Sintra. After a few pages, my father - himself born in India - exclaimed in true Iyerish fashion: "But I knew his father at Oxford." Raghavan Iyer, whose paternal figure was Gandhi, was said to practise levitation in his room at Magdalen. It was rumoured that his scout, seeing him floating on the ceiling, asked him to come down because he had brought Mr Iyer his shaving water. The Man within My Head by Pico Iyer 256PP, Bloomsbury t £14.99 (PLUS £1.25 p&p) Buy now from Telegraph Books (rrp £16.99, ebook £12.86)