Greene Grow the Authors

THE TEMPTER (225 pp.) -- Anthony Bloomfield--Scribner ($3.95).

Graham Greene discovered in Brighton Rock (1938) that a thriller's format and a dose of Krafft-Ebing can lure usually unreflective readers into a brush with the profound issues of guilt and redemption. To a steady procession of writers--all of them willing to be thought deep--the formula has seemed good enough to copy. The latest imitator, and one of the ablest, is Anthony Bloomfield, novelist and BBC scriptwriter. His imitation is not slavish, since his weighing-up produces rather different totals than the master's. But setting, characters, mood and action are all attentively derivative.

Corruption & Cure. The title figure and unlikely hero of Bloomfield's parable is a maker and seller of pornographic books and pictures, whose name is Samuels, or perhaps Samson, as is noted in files of the London police. The uncertainty reflects the book's focal paradox: Sammael is the angel of death, but Samson, as the author explains (stoutly refusing to allow himself the joys of obscurantism) means "of the sun, solar." The bookseller is subverter, protector, panderer and priest to a group of curious cripples--Julius, his bloodless, asexual young assistant; Louise, a housewife whose husband thinks her job is honest modeling; Bert, a cheerful, muscled vacuum; Veronica, a faintly mad Soho drifter; and Bateman, a policeman. Louise, Bert and Veronica pose for the pornographic pictures, and Bateman, assigned by headquarters to investigate the bookstore, shifts allegiance and becomes the cameraman. Each is held to the bookseller by his hurts, but each, unexpectedly, is strengthened more than corrupted. Julius approaches self-knowledge; Louise is subtly encouraged to face marriage and raise a family; Veronica's grasp of reality is strengthened; Bateman, numbed by an early divorce, comes to life again in an affair with Veronica.

Frightful Morality. The grotesque group therapy of the pornographer prompts the author to quote a passage from Mann's Doctor Faustus: "We only release, only set free. We let the lameness and self-consciousness, the chaste scruples and doubts go to the Devil." For Devil, Bloomfield adds thoughtfully, "read, if you like, 'Mr. Samson.' " Yet who is Samson? The bookseller shrouds himself in dialectic and mockery. He rails against society, and conjectures with an unreadable expression that in the "groans of disgust or cynical obscenities" uttered by buyers of his pornography, "one can hear the cry of man seeking a lost paradise." Does the Tempter hope to ensnare man or set him free?

The novel ends with a clear parallel to the Crucifixion. A corrupt, muckraking newspaperman (a stock figure so frequently employed in British fiction that he pops onstage, lines already learned, before the author has finished introducing him) threatens the pornographers, and the bookseller accepts the collective guilt of his healed cripples and goes to prison for them. Rather unnecessarily, Bloomfield has one of his characters point out the symbolism. Samson, then, is saviour, after all, and his gospel is a passage from Albert Camus: "I hate virtue that is only smugness; I hate the frightful morality of the world, and I hate it because it ends, just like absolute cynicism, in demoralizing men and keeping them from running their own lives with their own just measures of meanness and magnificence."

Bloomfield's novel, which despite its ostensible subject matter is not the least pornographic, leaves its readers impressed but dissatisfied. The author has stated intelligently the case against goodness gone rancid. But too often the moving finger, having writ, fails to move on; instead it remains bonily pointing out a moral or explicating a word derivation. Some of this is helpful, but the reader is spared the invigorating effort and delight of discovery.

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