Power & No Glory

THE VOLCANOES ABOVE Us (256 pp.)--Norman Lewis--Pantheon ($3.75).

Latin America has long been a favorite setting for a certain kind of fiction--part adventure, part ideology--that year by year seems to grow more bitter, desperate and violent. Novelists as different as D. H. Lawrence (The Plumed Serpent),

Graham Greene (The Power and the Glory) and Malcolm Lowry (Under the Volcano) have marched down that trail. What they have seen is less Latin America in the strict sense than a miniature reflection of world events--the Spanish Civil War, the Mexican Revolution, the struggle of Communist v. Catholic, the decline of imperial Britain and the rise of the U.S. Now Britain's Norman Lewis, a writer, minor tycoon (photographic supplies) and tireless traveler, continues the harsh, brilliant tradition.

High Wire. Author Lewis' hero is David Williams, a decadent, dishonest, flexible young Briton who hopes to regain his family plantations in Guatemala by helping overthrow the dictator who confiscated them. After entering Guatemala City with the triumphant rebels (under the command of a German ex-SS man), young David is dispatched to the town of Guadalupe and ordered to "take control of the situation." But he soon finds that both he and the new dictator who has sent him are mere stooges of the giant U.S. "Universal Coffee Co.," and of its Central American manager,

Winthrop Elliot--the most objectionable American seen in fiction since Graham Greene's Quiet one.

Elliot intends to open Guadalupe as a "U.C." tourist center, and is ruthlessly remodeling the local way of life. His labor force of Indians is forcibly housed in a "model" town of concrete "chalets." Company bulldozers backed by armed police have swept away every native shack and pigsty; now Indians dressed in "grey denim pajamas" go around with mechanical sprayers and disinfect each chalet daily. Starvation wages have gone: every Indian receives ample "credit value'' scrip entitling him to buy from the company stores. A high wire fence completes the humanitarian "Project"--or. as Elliot puts it, the Indians "have agreed to make a temporary sacrifice of their freedom in the interests, shall we say, of the true democratic liberty."

Jumping Wit. As Author Lewis rigs his story, the Indians detest the Project--particularly when their tawdry pagan altars are wiped off the landscape and their priests are imprisoned. At the very moment when Guadalupe is bustling with the first planeloads of U.S. tourists, the Indians rise. They shuffle through the town and on to freedom in the mountains, leaving Elliot and the Project behind them, crushed and abandoned.

Most readers will see in The Volcanoes Above Us a brutish and scurrilous parody of U.S. power in Guatemala. What makes this novel noteworthy is that it 1) echoes what all too many people in the world believe about the U.S.. and 2) is, for the most part, superbly written. Author Lewis has a jumping wit and, above all, Graham Greene's power of evoking the strange towns and landscapes of an alien civilization. He has written a novel that may well be detested, but cannot be dismissed.

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