A Secular 'Pilgrim's Progress'

...The protagonist, known to us only as "A," is a student in a vague European country in a time unspecified A mixture of youthful restlessness, idealism, and self-romanticization leads him from the security of his bourgeois family to membership in the Socialist Radical party For a time his idealism is sufficiently stimulated by the turgid meetings, a dreary love affair with a party worker, his self-image as an outcast, and by the pathetic party forays that are greeted with apathy by the underclass and parried with indifferent efficiency by the state...

...Even as A waits to commit the decisive act, he recognizes it may not be what he wants at all, that it may be no more than an absurd gesture replacing a meaningful act that exists only in a self-deceptive youthful dream "Do I want to kill this man...

...Although the book may be taken as a statement that the true revolutionary must act out the desperation and passion of his ideals without the security of ideology, The Revolutionary is a political novel only in the broad sense of the word What it really offers is a secularized Pilgrim's Progress--the individual coming to terms with his ideals in a world that provides merely a torturous path for expressing them and no guarantee that they are worth suffering the path that must be taken...

...We'll do it," he thinks "Contrary to all sense and expectation, we'll succeed, we'll set this town on edge, we will turn it upsidedown Give me a fulcrum and I'll move the world, well, love will be our fulcrum, we'll use people's hearts, we'll dig them out from under the mud and dust and everything they're so afraid of And suddenly it's going to be different " Yet it is indifference that continues, and A's exhilaration with intrigue as an end in itself fades as the party's harangue falls on deaf ears A particularly pathetic demonstration against a government election rally is dispatched with such alacrity by the police that neither spectators nor the object of the demonstration--the local mayor--is aware of what is supposed to be taking place...

...A Secular 'Pilgrim's Progress' THE REVOLUTIONARY By Hans Koningsberger Farrar, Straus, and Giroux 212 pp $4 95 Reviewed by HARRY ATKINS Author of forthcoming novel, "A Later Son, A Different Daughter" Hans Koningsberger's new novel is virtually a complete turnabout from his last I Know What I m Doing, published a few years ago, chronicled the adventures and misadventures of a young, hedonistic English girl tripping over and on the surface of life m New York The hero of The Revolutionary is a young idealist, ardently committed to finding an outlet for his ideals...

...A wonders, bomb in hand " Is it right, does it serve a purpose...

...It is A's last hesitation, if called upon he will go over the brink Throughout his journey he has been traveling toward comprehension of what Camus meant when he said "Rebellion cannot exist without a strange form of love Those who find no rest in God or history are condemned to live for those who, like themselves, cannot live in fact for the humiliated The most pure form of the movement of rebellion is thus crowned with the heartrending cry of Karamazov if all are not saved, what good is the salvation of one only...

...The difference between the two books is more than thematic, though In the earlier novel we were offered neither insight into the central character's motivation, nor continuity between the disconnected episodes The book was believable in the way a tape recording made on a street corner or in an apartment is believable--true-to-life," unselective and undramatic One was left with a feeling that the author had found a character to write about, but no subject The opposite might be said of The Re-volutionary...

...Successful fiction moves from the specific to the universal by presenting us with the tension of human experience While Koningsberger is capable of transcending a rather flat prose style to create individual scenes of dramatic texture he has sacrificed virtually all this tension and left us with an idea rather than an experience He might just as well have named every one of his characters with letters, since among them only A has even the beginnings of an identity of his own, and even in his case it is only the concept that we are left with, a familiar concept at that...

...Breaking with the party moderates, A undertakes a series of increasingly overt acts of anarchy We leave him on the brink of the most desperate act of all, political murder For A now a man alone, the act represents the ultimate commitment of the individual, "the externalization of idealism the only impeccably logical consequence of freedom and justice ". He is not quite alone, however, apparently a revolutionary Lancelot also needs his Guinevere Paralleling A's emergence as an activist is his romance with Helen—who first attracts him as a bitter symbol of the bourgeois world he has been trying to free himself from, then as a bittersweet remmder that that world is still within his grasp, and finally as a prelude to a different kind of love which demands negation of self...

...I think it does, but I do not know if that purpose is worth it I'm not afraid and I wonder why Perhaps because this isn't me doing this, it's an abstraction of justice Godhelpme, it is history...

...Flannery O'Connor once wrote "The serious fiction writer will think that any story that can be entirely explained by the adequate motivation of the characters or by a believable imitation of a way of life or by a proper theology, will not be a large enough story for him to occupy himself with This is not to say that he doesn't have to be concerned with adequate motivation or accurate reference or a right theology, he does, but he has to be concerned with them only because the meaning of his story does not begin except at a depth where these things have been exhausted" The Revolutionary never approaches that depth...

...The Revolutionary is, in fact, a romanticized distillation of concepts to be found in The Rebel At his best the author handles his subject with effective irony, at other times violins are very much in the foreground But to what extent can the book stand by itself as a novel...

...Even the satisfaction of punishment is denied A, after being briefly detained at the police station he is released "A had braced himself for another interrogation, and he had prepared a good speech, he thought He had been prepared to be beaten too The one thing he had not expected was to find himself in the street again ". In the aftermath of the demonstration, A is sent to smuggle a party leader back into the country He is unsuccessful, but hiding out from the soldiers patrolling the barren frontier, he has a premonition of his destiny, a perspective of the world he wishes to change that goes beyond the esthetic unity he had previously sought "He was outside the world m this barn a no man's land from where he could watch and judge and not be judged As the sun reached the door opening, he shifted with the square of light it projected, m which there was some warmth, and he was linked to it that way, and the earth turned under him without him He had the feeling again that it was all possible, even to him but this time it did not make him happy...