When Worlds Collide

By R.Z. Sheppard

CANNIBALS AND MISSIONARIES by Mary McCarthy Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; 369 pages; $10.95

First the good news: Mary McCarthy has not mellowed, certainly not in the way that some Eastern intellectuals of the '30s and '40s did when they moved West to become hot-tub philosophers. McCarthy, fortunately, lives in Paris, where a sharp critical intelligence is as prized as a set of newly honed kitchen knives. Her Olympian view has also remained keen.

But in her seventh novel, the first since Birds of America (1971), she has overflown her subject.

Cannibals and Missionaries is a very busy book. A committee of leading liberals is anxiously trying to get to pre-Ayatullah Iran to investigate charges that SAVAK, the Shah's secret police, tortures political prisoners. On the same Air France flight, a handful of rich American art collectors are bustling to the same destination for a look at what's new in Persian knickknacks. Neither group gets very far because the most active passengers of all are a team of hijackers--two Arabs and two young, middle-class Dutch radicals of the Baader-Meinhof persuasion.

After shooting an expensive cat that one passenger has let out of its carrying case, the terrorists order the pilot to land his 747 at a Dutch airport. There they demand and get a NATO helicopter to lift them and their hostages to a comfortably furnished farmhouse in Flevoland, one of the large areas that the industrious Hollanders have reclaimed from the sea. The house becomes the stage where this incongruous assembly play out their views on politics, religion, art and morality.

As McCarthy has shown in The Oasis (1949) and The Groves of Academe (1952), she is adroit at parsing intentions and ideologies: "Unlike God, the liberal was limited by ubiety. Nevertheless, why pick on the Shah? If the truth were known ... Reza Pahlavi's enormities had been chosen for this group's attention not just because he had an attractive country with an agreeable winter climate but for a still less pardonable motive: his regime was an easy target. Every good soul was opposed to torture, but it suited the Western soul's book to be able to attest to it in a distant land ruled by an oil monarch who was neither friend nor foe. A foe would not admit your committee, and to find fault with a friend would give pain."

This baleful opinion is expressed by a captive member of the Dutch Parliament. The tour of inquiry also includes clergymen, a woman college president, a journalist, an English don, a U.S. Senator and a Middle East expert from Buffalo. The art collectors are mostly codgers who, among them, own a modest share of the world's old masters. It is not easy: "The penalty of owning great works of art, or even itsy-bitsy ones, was that the minute anything out-of-the-way happened, your thoughts flew to them like a mother bird to the nest."

Nearly everyone turns out to be a materialist. The Palestinian gunmen are awed and seduced by the farmhouse's plumbing and appliances, and the radical chief is an art lover who decides to demand his prisoners' paintings as ransom. In the book's most amusing turn, crates of Cezannes, Degas and even a Vermeer arrive, and the farmhouse becomes an instant museum.

The possibility that this could happen strains credulity. The stated reasons for the initial hijacking defy it: "Seizing this body of self-appointed just men on an errand of mercy to the Third World struck at the core of the West's pious notion of itself. And to strike not at random but selectively, choosing showcase models of civic virtue whose price was above rubies and whom the West would have to save at any cost or renounce its image of 'caring,' was, of course, sacrilege." The committee members are undeniably prestigious hostages, but why would Palestinian and European radicals stop a group of Americans who might embarrass the Shah and his plutocracy?

The conception of Cannibals and Missionaries again shows why McCarthy has long been considered a leading social critic. The problems are in the novel's execution. Her cast is so large that she is forced to try to bring them to life with unwieldy dossiers rather than with dialogue and action. Her terrorists lack menace and their victims do not seem unduly fearful. Despite a nasty conclusion, the siege seems like one of those endless weekends when the house guests are thrown together by bad weather. What action and suspense do exist are repeatedly short-circuited by digressions on such topics as the Zuyder Zee, Japanese poetry and the utility of art. Somewhere between Arthur Hailey's Airport and Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain, Cannibals and Missionaries gets fog-bound in the author's good intentions.

-- R.Z. Sheppard

Excerpt

"Direct action had a perfect circular motion; it aimed at its own autonomous perpetuation and sovereignty. And the circle, as all students of drawing knew, was the most beautiful of forms. Thus in a sense he had returned to where he had started: terrorism was art for art's sake in the poetical realm. Some in the movement believed that their action would give rise to a new society, but this belief was an impurity. Jeroen was not even sure that the construction of a just society ought to concern a revolutionary; that dream had been dreamed too often. He thought Trotsky was right in his notion of the permanent revolution, right but insincere-- in his day of power his ruthless repression of the sailors of Kronstadt had exposed his real attitude. Revolution, if it was not just a catchword, should mean revolving, an eternal spinning, the opposite of evolution, so attractive to the bourgeois soul. For the true revolutionary, the only point of rest lay in the stillness at the center of the circle, just as a wheel rapidly turning on its axis gave the appearance of arrested motion.

Such ideas were deeply troubling to Greet. She did not like to hear him state that the struggles of the Palestinian people were merely a parenthesis, to be closed without regret when they had served their purpose."

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