BOO KS
her to the point of losing their purity. There are assorted refugees from
the countries behind the Iron Curtain, going through the futile gestures
of a resistance, the effectiveness of which they no longer believe in, un–
less they succeed in preserving belief through madness.
The pathos of the characters lies primarily in the mood that
pervades the book, possessing all of them, a "longing" to get the
inevitable over with, to submit to it with faith or at least resignation, to
have all doubts dispelled, if only in the eventless peace of the cemetery.
"Their faith is dead, their kingdom is dead, only the longing remains."
With one exception these characters are all seen from the outside
rather than from within; their actions reducible to reflexes, their feelings
to complexes, their words to propositions assigned to them by the
author rather than springing from their inner being; the flashbacks into
their past are like distillations in a
curriculum vitae
filled out for some
bureaucratic purpose. The one exception is instructive, for it is the
personage whose fate the author has felt most personally-that of the
Soviet "Hero of Culture," who finds himself suddenly freed in Paris from
the straitjacket of police compulsion, because the wife he has left behind
as hostage has died or committed suicide. Despite
his
physical escape
from compulsion, he too is under the spell of a dying world, and his
longing to write the "one truthful and great book of
his
life" ends in
impotent failure.
It is this unity of mood, a unity of lack of hope and lack of will,
that gives the book its impact and sets its limitations upon that impact.
There are moments when the characters hover on the edge of inde–
pendent life, when their movements come close to the compulsive and
obsessive actions of figures whose compulsions come from within; when
the easily recognizable figures of this
roman
a
clef
arouse the author's
distaste sufficiently for distaste to turn to anger and parody to satire.
But when one puts down the book in which interest has never flagged,
the feeling remains that one's interest has been held primarily by the
fact that this is our time, these our cares and preoccupations, the men
we know, argue with, mock at, feel sorry for, fear.
Bertram D. Wolfe
