Thorns in the Flesh

WAR IS HEAVEN! by D. Keith Mano. 226 pages. Doubleday. $5.95.

At first the title cavorts in the mind, a comical inversion of the cliche. By the end of D. Keith Mano's new novel, though, the resonances and realities of the words have lost all irony. They have become literal, horrifying statement.

The scene is slightly exotic--the imaginary South American republic of Camaguay--but the war is of a kind that is becoming all too familiar. American forces are aiding a local dictator in trying to wipe out a terrorizing Communist guerrilla army. What the book amounts to is an intimate, aghast report by an invisible correspondent attached to a mixed patrol of Americans and somewhat loyalist Camaguayans delivering supplies to an isolated camp.

Keith Mano's concern, however, is not with polemics or politics. He is absorbed, instead, by two seemingly antithetical characters: Jones, a disgruntled, cowardly medic who is a cranky version of Catch-22's manic Yossarian, and the patrol leader, Sergeant Hook, whose claw is a spiritual but deadlier version of Captain Hook's famous iron hand.

Clarence Hook is a fanatical Christian soldier for whom sword and plowshare are already one. His answer to "Make love, not war" is "We make war out of love. And God allows it out of love. Only an animal kills without love." Many of Hook's men idolize him. So do the Camaguayan villagers; he buries their relatives who have been cold-bloodedly murdered by terrorists and tenderly ministers to their impoverished sick.

But much of what Hook feels called upon to do in the name of his absolutist faith is cruelly vengeful and it puts his Christianity in darkest question. Indeed, his cruelty places him beneath the craven Jones. For Jones, life is dear even though he does not know how to live it lovingly. For Hook, life is disastrously cheap. Mano seems to suggest that despite Jones' selfishness, there is more cowardice, a more profound "giving up," in Hook's idealism. That idealism eyes heaven too hungrily and, at its tortured extreme, sees war as salvation because in death there is no war.

War Is Heaven! is Mano's third book (Bishop's Progress, Horn) and his third troubled study of guided or misguided faith confronting worldliness. A wise and gifted novelist, Mano pierces real human flesh with his intellectual thorns.

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