Critics' choices for Christmas
Schwartz, Jack
Jack Schwartz Jack Schwartz is the retired book editor of Newsday. Mysteries are perhaps the most seductive literary genre because they appeal to the detective in us, the natural itch to solve a...
...There the resemblance ends...
...Rose has so far not proved as commercially successful as such earlier Cruz-Smith works as Gorki/ Park...
...Japrisot, the author of several French mysteries, has here written as much a story of romance as of detection-and its resolution satisfies both impulses...
...When a story can unite both of these elements we are in a category of literary pleasure that transcends genre, and Knowledge of Angels (Bantam, $10.95,268 pp...
...In a similar vein we have Sebastien Ja-prisot's A Very Long Engagement (Plume, $11.95, 327 pp...
...This is a pity because Rose may be Cruz-Smith's most ambitious book...
...At the heart of the mystery is a pit-girl named Rose with whom Maypole became tragically obsessed and whose fatal allure casts a dangerous spell on Blair as well...
...The cardinal prince is worldly, wise, and generous-but still a man of his era...
...a small pearl which may have been lost in the rough seas of publishing...
...Like the best detective stories, it explores the far greater mystery of a world re-imagined...
...the menacing, treacherous, backbending labyrinth of the mines pilloried by Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier-etched here in a carbon blueprint of Gehenna...
...He is given a final chance at redemption by his erstwhile employer, Bishop Hannay, an Anglican prelate whose fortune springs from the coal fields of Wigan which he rules over in baronial splendor...
...Mathilde is remorseless and indefatigable as she unravels the events that occurred in the no-man's land before a snow-filled trench called Bingo Crepuscule on the Sunday of Epiphany, 1917...
...Into this tapestry is woven the separate tale of a wild child found in the mountains whose destiny will entwine itself with Palinor's...
...Paradoxically, the manner of their execution is to set an example for their comrades but to be kept from their families...
...even an acknowledgment of doubt since it allows at least the possibility of God's existence...
...With great equanimity and ease, Palinor rejects all this, creating a problem for Severo who comes to respect this atheist as a man of principle and is determined to save him from the penalty imposed on nonbe-lievers: the stake...
...His investigations uncover a Boschian underworld whose moral depths plunge far below the deepest mines in the Hannay nether-realm...
...Like Palinor, Smith's protagonist is an engineer, an outsider and an unbeliever-or at least a devout skeptic...
...A young priest, John Maypole, engaged to the bishop's daughter, has disappeared during a mining explosion, and Hannay wants Blair to discover what's happened to Maypole, whose passionate imitation of Christ brought his preaching from the pulpit to the pits...
...Blair's qualifications for the job are that he knows his way around mines, he is resourceful, and he's expendable...
...Technically, the book is not a detective story, but it is an investigation: an inquiry into the nature-and the limits-of grace, perhaps the greatest mystery...
...The stranger, Palinor, is a prince in his own kingdom, a realm where science and tolerance abide-his authority at home derives from his skill as an engineer...
...by Jill Paton Walsh, does just that...
...The victims of this judicial murder represent a wide swath of French society, and Mathilde's seven-year search takes us on a journey into the heart of France before, during, and after the slaughter of the Great War...
...Wigan, an English coal-mining center in the late nineteenth century, may be an earthly hell compared to the Arcadian world of Grandinsula, but it is just as finely drawn in Martin Cruz Smith's Rose (Random House, $25, 364 pp...
...A critic may say that Palinor is too good to be true, but Palinor might say the same of God...
...And it is a realm, for all its fabulous invention, whose shepherds, clerics, townsfolk, and nuns are all grounded in earthly reality...
...Mysteries are perhaps the most seductive literary genre because they appeal to the detective in us, the natural itch to solve a puzzle, the eternal child trying to discover how the magician has hidden the rabbit...
...To be sure, this is not a standard detective novel, which is a commercial weakness and a literary strength...
...Five men have been convicted of shamming wounds during World War I and have been sentenced by the French military to a particularly gruesome death...
...It is ruled benignly by Severe, an enlightened cardinal prince...
...The colors and texture of Paris, of la France profonde, and of the trenches are palpable on the page, enhanced by the fine translation of Linda Coverdale...
...Her characters ring true to their own world...
...Jonathan Blair, too fond of the bottle, in disgrace for misappropriating Bible funds in Africa during his sojourn there as a mining surveyor (and worse, having "gone native" with black women), is on his last, fever-ridden legs in London...
...Smith engages the reader from the first page, inviting us in, luring us until we are deliciously trapped in his story...
...Although for moderns, mysteries are driven by reason-the formidable logic and observatory powers of a Holmes-the ancients saw them as something to be wondered at, rather than explained...
...Mathilde, confined to a wheelchair since a childhood accident, is a most determined and resolute detective...
...A profession of faith-Saracen, Jewish, Pagan- is acceptable...
...But as literature they serve well enough as a feast for the mind and fare for the soul.re for the soul...
...Jill Paton Walsh, perhaps known best for her children's books, has here written a very sophisticated novel and is careful to avoid the trap of historical figures talking in contemporary tongues...
...A stranger is shipwrecked on Grand-insula, an apocryphal island in the Mediterranean, at that eyeblink of time between the late Middle Ages and the early Renaissance...
...And we are transfixed by the mad "logic" of this war which breeds "only infamy, futility, and excrement...
...To do so, he enlists his old friend, the devout scholastic Bene-ditx, for whom reason is a buttress in the tower of faith and God's existence can be demonstrated by logical proofs...
...It is Gothic in structure but Gallic in tone...
...Palinor is also an atheist, a matter which is of little importance to him but of great concern to his hosts...
...You might say the book begins where the movie Paths of Glory ends...
...And as Blair unearths the macabre events of Maypole's disappearance we see through his jaundiced yet judicious eyes a sordid social topography: "antislavery" missionaries shilling for British colonialists...
...miners eking out a brutish living in a Hobbes-ian universe...
...All three of these richly painted and deftly narrated books could make wonderful films...
...Yet Mathilde, the fiancee of one of the condemned, is not to be put off by these fabrications and is determined to find out what happened to her lover, Manech...
...We see families dismembered,hopes crushed, lives destroyed, men acting with heroism and desperation, their women responding with anguish, resignation, and rage...
...Despite its human travails, Grandinsula is close to an earthly paradise, lush, prosperous, and secure in the certitude of its universal Catholic faith...
...Along the way, Mathilde finds that there are other forces on both sides who wish to suppress her investigation for a complex array of reasons, both valid and villainous...
...Like Severo, Beneditx becomes entranced by the stranger's intellect and integrity, and anguished as he fails to shake Palinor's faith in his atheism...
Vol. 123 • December 1996 • No. 21
