Kingdom of Shivas Irons Review
“The Kingdom of Shivas Irons” (1997) is a worthy sequel that never escapes the book it follows. Michael Murphy’s “Golf in the Kingdom” (1972) had the advantage of arriving first, into a culture that had not yet heard the argument; the sequel extends the same blend of mystical golf narrative, philosophy and human potential into a market where the territory had already been well worked.
The book it follows
“Golf in the Kingdom” is a semi-autobiographical novel in which a young Murphy, en route to an ashram in India, stops in Scotland and meets the enigmatic golf professional and mystic Shivas Irons at the fictional Burningbush links. Over twenty-four hours, including one mythic round, Irons delivers lessons that fuse golf technique with spirituality, altered states and transcendence, drawing on Sri Aurobindo, Zen and Western esotericism.
It became a cult classic on a scale few golf books reach: over a million copies sold, nineteen languages, John Updike’s verdict that it was “a golf classic if any exists in our day,” and a reach well past golf, as when Phil Jackson handed it to Michael Jordan. It also produced a society of its own. Its charm lay in the freshness of the fusion, links golf’s earthy magic joined to inner-game metaphysics at a moment when the combination felt new. Golfers still cite “Shivas moments” of flow the book caught exactly.
The sequel
The second book picks up years later, with Murphy returning to Scotland to find the now-elusive Irons. It pursues his continuing wisdom through human potential, Platonism, and frank paranormal material—ghosts on the course, luminous bodies—toward the same question of transcendence through golf. There is more adventure here, more philosophy, and a whiskey-fueled mysticism the first book only gestured at.
What it does well it does generously. The Scottish links atmosphere is as evocative as before, the storytelling holds, and the ideas about peak experience and the body-mind-spirit connection are put with conviction. It works as a handbook for spiritual adventure in the game. For readers already inside the first book’s world it pays out: unresolved threads get taken up, including sightings of Irons’ own guru, and Murphy’s optimistic humanism is undiminished.
The trouble is the year. By 1997 the golf-as-Zen territory had been mined thoroughly, by other “Zen and the Art of” books and by a sports-psychology industry that had absorbed the same ideas. What had been cutting-edge in 1972 read as familiar. The sequel also turns harder into dense metaphysics, which interrupts the narrative in a way the first book’s tighter, more enchanting romp never did. Kirkus, reviewing the ghosts and phantoms with evident enjoyment, caught the heightened register accurately. The result is a book that is pleasant to read once and rarely reached for again.
Against the rest of the amateur canon
Writing about traditional amateur golf tends to work the game’s soul: the raw beauty of links, camaraderie, history, personal growth, humor, and the amateur spirit set against the professional grind. Bernard Darwin’s observational prose on courses and characters, Herbert Warren Wind, Wodehouse’s comic fiction, Bobby Jones’s reflections, Harvey Penick’s wisdom, and Tom Coyne’s travelogues all sit in that line.
Murphy is the mystical outlier. His books are parable and inner exploration rather than narrative, instruction, architecture or match story, and they elevate amateur golf on traditional Scottish links into a vehicle for transcendence. That aligns him with the romantic, non-commercial ethos of the game even as it separates him from everyone else writing in it. “Golf in the Kingdom” fits the canon as a modern classic that caught the wonder and the childlike essence of play. The sequel extends the same claim into ground that is more esoteric and, for most readers, narrower.
Alongside “A Good Walk Spoiled” or “Paper Tiger,” Murphy’s value is that he takes seriously what those books treat as atmosphere: golf as meditation, as life metaphor, as a route into the zone. A traditionalist who wants grounded history or technique will find the paranormal Platonism hard going.
Read both if the mystical side appeals. But the first book is the one that matters, and the second knows it.