Alone at Last

THEGODFORGOTTEN by GLADYS SCHMITT 312 pages. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. $6.95.

The Godforgotten are the nuns and monks of St. Cyprian, as Novelist Schmitt calls her island, and it seems that God forgot them--or so they thought--in A.D. 997. In those years just before 1000, theologians were predicting the imminent Second Coming of Jesus Christ; with the end of the millennium would come the end of the world followed by the Last Judgment with infinities of sinners standing naked before the Lord. When an earthquake and tidal wave struck, washing away St. Cyprian's connection with the mainland, its people simply supposed that God had emptied the rest of the world, forgetting the survivors on St. Cyprian like so many grains of salt in an empty bag.

One century later, enter Father Albrecht of Cologne, a desiccated Benedictine monk, sent by Rome to restore to the church whatever wayward children he may find on the island. Somehow it all works. Part of the merit is in Author Schmitt's economy of words (her description of 11th century Christendom: "Purified to small purpose at great cost"). Part of it, too, is the tantalizing, gradually unfolded history of marooned St. Cyprian: the early, apocalyptic piety, the later license, the hallucinogenic crops, the bloody rage. And finally the second cataclysm: the shock of realization and rebirth when Father Albrecht arrives with the news that the outside world exists after all.

If books could be read where they might most be enjoyed, this one would be saved for a bleak day at Mont-St.-Michel, with the high tide rolling gray against the rocks and Gregorian chant echoing in the mind. .Mayo Mohs

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