Joans of Arc

By * Melvin Maddocks

BLOOD RED, SISTER ROSE

by THOMAS KENEALLY 384 pages. Viking. $8.95.

The original legend of Joan of Arc was all ethereal voices and uprolled eyes. George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan suffered from an opposite flaw: a 15th century French farm girl with 19th century English socialist leanings, she seemed all pragmatism and muddy boots.

Between this Joan-too-spiritual and that Joan-too-earthy, a third Joan has been waiting to be born. In his eighth novel, Australian Thomas Keneally, who once studied for the priesthood, slowly and thoughtfully reconstructs a whole Joan, less spectacular than the first two but decidedly more convincing and perhaps, at last, more moving.

Whores and Lice. At her simplest level, the Keneally Joan can be very simple indeed--obstinate but rather dull with the protuberant brown eyes of a cow: "Looking at her, you nearly went to sleep." She is an object of manipulation. The knights wave her like a banner to win battles. The "fat clergy" cash in those victories as new ecclesiastical revenue. The Dauphin, of course, uses her to gain his crown. Keneally graphically savors the irony of this visionary innocent ("our little he-nun") ending up in the midst of disemboweled and headless corpses, moving from battlefield to bloody battlefield in the company of assassins, whores and lice.

But this clownish dupe, Keneally also knows, finally outmanipulated all her manipulators. To Keneally she is the incarnation of an idea whose time had come -- the peasant striding into the council of kings and lords of the church. As rude as common fare, she serves notice on the feudal system that knighthood is no longer in flower. As she lifts the siege at Orleans and pushes her balky Dauphin with the "fat, un happy lips" toward his coronation at Rheims, she is hurrying onstage not a monarchy but the modern nation-state. The descendants of this Joan are the bourgeoisie.

But the Joan that ultimately fascinates Keneally is Saint Joan. To him, her voices are as real as she is. Why not? Keneally's world of 1420 is full of voices -- from all sorts of prophets, as trologers, witches. Every oak grove is "enchanted timber." The Golden Bough seems to coexist with the Gospels on these pages, rinding common ground in the ritual of sacrifice. From the first, Keneally's virgin, who never even menstruated, is predestined to shed blood as scapegoat for her unworthy King. "All she wanted to do," he sums up, "was achieve her own victimhood."

Were the voices then holy or demonic? It depends on who is listening, Keneally seems to say. But if he has no new answer, he has a new question. His Joan -- part battle flag, part rebel and part saint -- adds up to a heroic surrogate for the absurd and contradictory in Every man, "the feel of the frayed edges of all the world's foolishness coalescing in her guts." Is her mystery, he asks, harder to explain than the mystery of any reader's life?

* Melvin Maddocks

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