Sacred & Profane

INCENSE TO IDOLS (312 pp.)--Sylvia Ashman-Warner--Simon & Schuster ($3.95).

One excellent novel is just that: two of them by the same author form strong evidence that the world has another fine writer. Sylvia Ashton-Warner's first novel. Spinster, astonished critics last year with its power, insight, and. to use a phrase of her own, pride of word. The only reservation tenable was that since the author, a middle-aged New Zealand schoolteacher, had written of a middle-aged woman who taught school, it was possible that the force of her novel sprang from circumstance, not art. Incense to Idols removes this possibility.

Flow of Words. The author's heroine is shatteringly beautiful, amoral, narcotically charming, and men queue up to destroy themselves for her. Such a description might come from any dust jacket, but Novelist Ashton-Warner's portrait is all but unique. Germaine de Beauvais. a young Parisian concert pianist who exiles herself to New Zealand after the death of her husband, is a woman as convincingly evoked as Emma Bovary or Molly Bloom. The narrative is a first-person reverie; a stream of consciousness, then a torrent, then a willful, feminine shutting down of thought. Germaine is mirrored in the flow of words as well as in their content. Prose of a different texture would be necessary if she were older, or merely pretty, or a shade less turbulent.

Although she is an accomplished pianist. Germaine has no profound love for music --or for anything else--and it is merely a whim that brings her to a clattering New Zealand town to study with a master who is himself an exile there. She meets him: "'Give me some more of that wine Leon.' I investigate the state of my hair. 'I feel better now.' I watch the green-clad form humbling and anxiously pouring my wine not spilling any this time taking the greatest care. Can't you men be pathetic? Especially when you're in the heart's confessional. But I never was one for pathos. Didn't I say somewhere that souls were complicating? I meant to ... I feel considerably better and lift one leg over the other, discreetly."

Bad Choosers. In this scene Germaine is. of course, elegantly allowing herself to be seduced. But she has longer-range interests of a similar nature, and they involve another man. The situation invites triteness; he is the minister of the local church--a hulking, clumsy, God-obsessed man. But Pastor Guymer is no Reverend Davidson, and in the end it is not his suicide that closes the book. The unbending wrath of the Old Testament fills Guymer, and he calls down the vengeance of the God he loves upon the parishioners he despises. Germaine listens with a musician's delighted ear as he roars about frippery and fornication. She squirms with amusement at the thought that she is the Baal worshiper whom the pastor is denouncing. Men are no more than characters in a bedroom farce to Germaine, but Guymer is a character with a rumbling voice, a powerful body, and a mind to be mocked.

When he makes a pastoral call, she wears the deadliest of Chinese gowns. But he remains calm and celibate, and she settles down contentedly to a long campaign. Still with her cat's eye on Guymer, she toys with a number of roving husbands ("Most good men are bad choosers and all the best are married"), and placidly accepts a proposal of marriage from a man whose wife lies dying in a hospital. Of the wife. Germaine thinks no more than: "Another conforming New Zealander she'll be breeding and spreading and fading without the slightest knowledge of Style.'' (Such pronouncements have not endeared Author Ashton-Warner to her country's critics, who roast her books with chauvinistic petulance.)

But Germaine is merely amoral, not evil. When the wreckage from her stylish sinning begins to tumble, she goes to Guymer. He gives her no help; indeed, obsessed with his love for an angry God and his own vision of radioactive death for an unheeding world. Guymer does not even hear her.

Offense Against Style. God, man, morality and beauty spin a treacherous web, but the author negotiates it without becoming entangled in didacticism. Salvation is in the air--but it is not discussed. It lies no more in Guymer's Jehovah than in the Baal of a pathetic and charming Germaine. And the Christians of Guymer's congregation are inconsequential creatures whose most exalted emotion is flaccid good will. If Novelist Ashton-Warner points a way, it is only by implication, in a wandering thought of Germaine's: "My whole life I've burnt incense to idols when I could have burnt incense to love.''

The novel's only important flaw is this: one feels that although the two main characters strike a neat balance in steril ity, their coming together was not inevitable, and did not really matter that much. Germaine would have sinned her way to the story's climax--reached not because of guilt but because the clutter of her life was an offense against Style--and Guymer would have raged his way to oblivion, even if they had never met. Because of this, the author's second novel may be a lesser book than Spinster, but it is hard to think of another recent novel with which it could be compared.

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