Plague in Provence

THE HORSEMAN ON THE ROOF (426 pp.) --Jean Giono--Knopf ($4).

The doctor began poking about in corners and cupboards. "What are you looking for?" asked Angelo Pardi. "The last one," answered the-doctor cryptically. [He] must have dragged himself off to some unspeakable corner. As he's the one who has a chance, he's the one we have to find." At last they found him in a storeroom, doubled up in his death agony. "Grab him by the shoulders," snapped the doctor, "unbutton his trousers . . .Rub his legs." But within minutes "the last one" was blue, cold and dead. And dead, too, by the next night, was the valiant doctor.

So begins the latest problem novel by France's Jean Giono. For dust-jacket purposes, it may be described as the stirring adventures of a young Italian officer making his way home through the south of France during the terrible 1838 epi demic of Asiatic cholera. But at bottom, it is not a costume novel at all; it is a new appraisal of an ancient subject --human mortality. Death, and the behavior of people in the face of death, make its subject matter, but its main question is: How should man behave, ideally, when confronted by his oldest, most ruthless enemy?

Valor & Cowardice. Angelo continues his ride to Italy convinced that the conduct of the intrepid doctor is the best answer to this question. For everywhere he goes, most men & women are responding to the threat of death with be havior that is a degradation of the hu man spirit. The rich are fleeing the plague in expensive carriages, bribing quarantine officials to let them through. The middle class are incapable of fleeing because they are weighed down by stuffed furniture and bric-a-brac. The poor are working themselves into a state of hysteria by spreading and believing bloodcurdling ru mors. The happy-go-lucky are whoring and boozing in a last, sordid spree; the eccentrics are staging a comic opera and disguising themselves from death by dressing up as Pierrots, Harlequins, Columbines, clowns. One man is getting by (he hopes) insisting that a cholera epidemic does not exist. Most are being destroyed by their own suspicions, e.g., when Angelo thinks up a plan to escape quarantine, half of them reject it because it is simple and the rest because it is practical. No plan, they argue, can be good if it is "available to everybody."

With the image of the heroic doctor always in his mind, Angelo tends the sick in one plague-stricken village after an other. "You can see, can't you," he pleads with the terrified villagers, "that I, though I look after the sick and touch them, am not ill? . . .[You] who are afraid and suspicious of everything will die." But Angelo loses faith in the doctor's example when he finds that there is no way to save people from dying. So he teams up for a while with a stouthearted nun and works mightily, washing and laying out corpses. But this, too, fails him when he realizes that the fearless nun does not really care whether people stay alive; she only wants them to look "clean and decent" at the Resurrection. "He's tricked us!" she shouts furiously when one of the "corpses" sits up. "He's alive, and I washed his backside."

Symbols & Images. When Angelo at last rides over the mountains to Italy, he carries with him a few hard-earned conclusions. One is that death is not such a terrible thing, because most people are "dead" in life and make the world "a cemetery above the ground." Another is that death has no patience with people who strike attitudes and make sentimental gestures. A third--the most important--is that it is man's duty to hold his head high and to struggle all his life "to be stronger, or more handsome, or more seductive than death."

Much of this view of life and death is as old as the Stoics and as new as the Existentialists. Where Jean Giono differs from both Marcus Aurelius and Jean-Paul Sartre is in his addiction to verbal color and sensuous imagery. The Horseman on the Roof is an orgy of symbolic corpses, stinks, carrion crows and flesh-eating nightingales, interspersed with involved philosophical breedings and brisked up with epigrams ("Cavalrymen like women to scream"; "I'm afraid of grocers when they have guns"). But. like most contemporary philosophical novelists, Giono makes no real effort to be clear or intelligible. It is hard to see how he expects to help .lift modern man out of his "cemetery above the ground" by dropping a load of symbolical rubble on his spinning head.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.