Love in a Hot Climate

FETISH (250 pp.)--Christine Gamier --Putnam ($3).

Christine Gamier, 37, is a handsome Frenchwoman whose novels never got very far with either critics or the public. Then she wrote a book on black magic, called Fetishism in Africa, which drew cheers from French scientists. Author Gamier thereupon decided to splice her minor talent for fiction with her knowledge of African life. The result was Fetish, a novel which sold a phenomenal (for France) 135,000 copies.

Christine Gamier still lacks skill as a novelist, but in Fetish it scarcely seems to matter. The book's main virtue is its French West African background, as stirring and authentic as a native dance. Author Gamier got her atmosphere and materials from spending six months with a team of 50 native nurses and a French doctor treating leprosy victims in Togoland and Dahomey. Her heroine is one such nurse, an African girl named Doelle (in native dialect, "born on Tuesday").

Doelle was what the French call an evoluee, a literate native. She spoke French, had gone to nursing school and was a baptized Catholic. She had given up the fetish worship of her tribe and family, no longer believed that pythons were gods, or that the insides of cockroaches had special powers. She was, moreover, beautiful and the mistress of the young French magistrate in the village of Manoho. But she had the broad toes and fuzzy hair of an African native; the French colony, Doelle knew, might tolerate her but would never accept her.

Doelle took things as they came, let life sift "like cornmeal through my fingers." But when the French doctor's beautiful wife came out to join him, passions began to pop in Manoho. Every white man in the district, including Doelle's own lover, lusted after the sexy Parisienne. The women, of course, feared and hated her, but only Doelle did anything about it. With the help of a native cook, and using small doses of a slow poison, she almost killed her white rival. When the doctor and his wife returned to France, life resumed its old pace, but Doelle realized that she had slid a long way back toward witchcraft.

Author Garnier's characters are thoroughly convincing without ever being fully revealed. The most effective quality in Fetish is the African atmosphere, the feeling of black indolence and white frustration, and the briefly flashing native scenes: villages wholly populated by lepers, mass witchcraft rites, a meal in the hut of a native chief. Almost as good are a few descriptions of the bored, boring, hard-drinking whites. The line between them and complete moral collapse seems almost as thin as the one that separates Christianized Doelle from the black magic of her ancestors.

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