Velio's Villainy

THE COUNCIL OF EGYPT by Leonardo Sciascia. 212 pages. Knopf. $4.95.

By the light of a single fluttering candle, a tall solemn priest sits bowed above a resplendent manuscript in his solitary scriptorium. On the table before him lie vials of red and blue and purple inks, pots of honey-colored glue, sheets of gold leaf, and reams of creamy antique vellum glowing golden in the candlelight. Only the scratching of a quill interrupts the rich religious silence as the priest pursues his labor of love.

As it happens, the labor of love is a forgery. As it further happens, the forgery is historical fact: in the 18th century a priest named Giuseppe Vella actually perpetrated a fraudulent history of Sicily under Norman rule and briefly imposed his imposture on the credulous court of Naples. In this shrewd, satiric novel about Vella and his villainy, Sicily's Leonardo Sciascia hilariously spoofs impostors and imposture and etches a bitter likeness of sunny Sicily's decadent nobility.

Giuseppe himself was no noble--just a wily, smily commoner with an aristocrat's taste for the high life and an artist's delight in illusion. Inflamed by the success of an earlier minor effort, he determines to fill a hiatus in the historical records with a phony account of the foundations of feudalism in Sicily. He calls it The Council of Egypt. To the nobles he hints that their ancient rights may be demolished by his findings; all at once, gifts and invitations to dine pour in upon Giuseppe. To the King in Naples he insists that the nobles' rights are mythical and properly accrue to the Crown; perhaps the royal gratitude could find him a sinecure somewhere?

Yet nothing recedes like success.

More than dinners and sinecures, Giuseppe needs an audience to applaud his artistry. In a moment of pride, he confesses all to his bishop--and is immensely gratified by the sensation he creates. At the last, touched (as the real Vella was not) by considerations of justice and truth, he placidly accepts imprisonment.

The conclusion is pallid; Author Sciascia's novel starts more promisingly than it ends. Much of its second half is given over to an incongruously earnest subplot concerning a Jacobin revolutionary and his bloody, awful torture at the hands of the government. Even so, readers who remember Giuseppe di Lampedusa and his Leopard's lament for a lost aristocracy will be amused by this compensatory catcall from the other side of the island.

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