Wednesday's Children

SETTING FREE THE BEARS by John Irving. 335 pages. Random House. $5.95.

It may be a symptom of just how cosmopolitan the modern world has become. Or it may merely be talent. Whatever the cause, John Irving, a young American writer, has successfully created two European characters, set them against a European landscape, and turned them loose in what has always been a typical American literary form--the novel of youthful escape and adventure. From Huckleberry Finn to On the Road, the characters in such stories yearn for joyful freedom; their picaresque progress becomes a disapproving comment on the society they are trying to flee. Forced back into confrontation with that society--as the main characters in Irving's fine first novel are--they tend to dream up quixotic schemes for drastically revising the world they hoped to reject. In this case, the reform involves an inspired plan to liberate all the animals in Vienna's Hietzinger Zoo.

Hannes Graff and Siegfried Javotnik are Austrian students. They could just as well be undergraduates at Columbia, bent on bringing off a zoo bust for the seals in Central Park. At first they throb and chortle through the spring countryside on a huge 700-cc. Royal Enfield motorcycle. But even there they come face to face with cruelty and the law. Siggy, the idealist of the pair, fights with a milkman who is mistreating a horse. Trying to escape the police, he is killed crashing into a wagonload of honey-filled beehives.

Pre-Womb Existence. With this sardonically bittersweet tragedy, the book begins to shift from a comic, rather hip tale into a complex and moving novel with sharp historic resonances. The grieving Graff delves into Siggy's notebooks, which contain a somewhat fictional history of his parents and of the marks laid upon their lives by experiences during and immediately after World War II in Yugoslavia and Austria. Siggy calls these notes his "prehistory," and his recollected stories seem touched by the bizarre influence of Gunter Grass. On the day in 1938 when Austria capitulates to Hitler, for example, a man whom Siggy's mother loved but did not marry creates hysteria in Vienna by running around costumed as a Habsburg eagle. Siggy's real father is a Yugoslav who escapes on a motorcycle in 1944, during the terrible struggle between the German army, Tito's partisans, Mihailovich's Chetniks and a Croatian terrorist gang.

Memories of both men influence Siggy's desire for freedom, his somewhat antic character. Yet he feels cursed by not having lived through World War II himself. Instead, he feels, he has been consigned by history to a time in which he cannot dramatically affect the course of events or participate in them. Siggy's anger at the present, and his awareness that it is haunted by the past, are reinforced in other sections of his notebooks, called "the Zoo Watch." These tell of nights spent at the zoo, where he catches the night watchman--an ex-Nazi who once tortured Jews--tormenting the animals now in his charge.

Sensitive to suffering, the author describes all immediate and sensual events with poetic grace--even such prosaic occurrences as the starting of a motorcycle: "Siggy had caught it and held it; thick balls of gray were lobbed from the tailpipes, as weightless and wispy as dust kittens. They seemed like flimsy wads of hair, so tangled that we'd later find them in the garden, strung from the forsythia like mangled pieces of wigs."

John Irving studied at the University of Vienna and knows his scene. Yet his ability to make European historical anecdote live in fiction is truly remarkable in an American writer. When the great zoo bust finally comes through and some of the beasts run free, the drama encompasses the longings and agonies of youth, whether they endured the horrors of World War II or merely are trapped in the confused present.

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