Scan with Your Life

THE BRAVE BULLS (270 pp.)-Lea --Little, Brown ($3).

Nobody has written as well as this about toros and toreros since Heming way's Death in the Afternoon. Unlike Hemingway's masterpiece, which was part fine reporting and part esthetics, The Brave Bulls is a novel written up to the classic hilt, with the sweat of honest craftsmanship; it goes a long way toward being, like the corrida that is its climax "a combat without adornment, all tragedy, all truth."

Novelist Tom Lea's father was mayor of El Paso, Tex., and he grew up among ranchers. Lea, however, became no cattle-raising Texan; he became an artist. As such, on commission for LIFE, he landed on Peleliu in September 1944, with an assault wave of U.S. marines and lived through one of the bloodiest island battles of the Pacific war. Since his return he has been hanging around Mexican bull rings with a new ear for the heartbeats of men in danger.

A Second Tequila. So The Brave Bulls, Lea's first novel, is a war book of a kind that most critics forgot to expect. The Brave Bulls has nothing, ostensibly, to do with the war, but the sand of the bull ring in this book is also the sand of the Peleliu beaches; the black and powerful truth that fills the book is the truth of death that marines learned on Peleliu's Bloody Nose Ridge.

Any number of things might have changed the course of the corrida at Cuenca on Saint Barbara's Day. For example, if Eladio Gomez, tight-fisted impresario of the little Mexican bull ring, had not taken a second tequila one morning he might never have signed up Luis Bello, the famous and expensive matador. If Matador

Bello had not been in a rage, he might not have demanded that the impresario get the finest bulls in Mexico for him and his brother Pepe to fight.

The most important coincidence, however, is that just a week before the event in Cuenca the matador faces a moment worse than any he has known in the bull ring: his mistress and his best friend are killed in an auto smashup after spending the weekend together. Matador Bello, knowing in his bones that both have betrayed him, feels uncontrollable fear for the first time. At the gate of the Cuenca bull ring, his mouth is dry, his palms wet.

Dealing Death, In detail, The Brave Bulls is alive with precise knowledge: of the moods and lingo of bullfighters, the atmosphere and routine of a great Mexican breeding ranch, the elaborate ritual of the corrida itself. The writing is clumsy in places, but it is also direct, penetrating and sustained; it makes the slicker sorts of professionalism look pointless. And the book is, finally, both religious in its treatment of ultimates and morally eloquent in its strong rebuke for those who scorn any culture but their own.

There is no philosophical talk about bullfighting in The Brave Bulls until the writer has thoroughly pictured the rawness, depravity and greed that go into it with the bravery. Then he allows a little group of aficionados to say a few things:

"The festival of the bulls is the only art form in which violence, bloodshed and death are palpable and unfeigned. It is the only art in which the artist deals actual death and risks actual death, as if a poet were called upon to scan his lines with his life . . . All arts, even the most abstract, are essentially creations to thrill. To allow man to participate in God's designs at one step removed from the anguish of living them."

By this definition The Brave Bulls, from first to last strong with a sense of design, qualifies as a work of art.

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