Conflagrations

By Patricia Blake

A WEED FOR BURNING by Conrad Detrez Translated by Lydia Davis Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 258 pages; $13.95

The title is ironic: the unwanted plant is the author. All his life, Conrad Detrez, 48, has been inflamed by credos and causes. The Belgian youth became an ardent mystic and prepared for the monastic life at the Roman Catholic University of Louvain in the 1950s. A few years later he was a lay missionary in Brazil. There he was appalled by the misery of the masses he had come to inspire with the message of Christ. Soon he had become a follower of Marx and Che Guevara and a guerrilla fighting with the Communists. Eventually he was tried and convicted as a subversive and deported back to Europe. A naturalized Frenchman, Detrez was appointed a cultural attache to the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua by France's Socialist government.

Before he turned to this semiautobiographical novel, Detrez published two fragmentary accounts of his pious Catholic boyhood and a pamphlet defending guerrilla warfare titled For the Liberation of Brazil. Out of this unpromising welter of religious and political rhetoric there has emerged the wholly unsuspected, a writer of genuine promise.

Young Conrad, the hero of the novel, grows up in a Belgian village in a home overrun with luxuriant potted plants. The hothouse upbringing keeps him devout, unworldly and suppliant. At a Catholic school he yearns to become a saint. Tormented by sexual feelings, he admits to his spiritual adviser that "two flies had landed on the page of one of my treatises and were fornicating and I didn't stop them." Conrad makes up for his lustful thoughts by committing holy books to memory and praying for the conversion of atheists. His confessions become so monotonously pure minded that his adviser feels certain that "the plant of lust in me had been well and truly desiccated." He is ready for the priesthood.

At the Catholic seminary in Louvain, however, Conrad is unsettled by the fierce theological disputes that follow in the wake of the Second Vatican Council of 1962. When a confused fellow seminarian from Brazil quits before ordination, Conrad follows him into the secular world and, ultimately, to Brazil. In Lydia Davis' evocative translation, the pages Detrez devotes to Rio de Janeiro's celebrated carnival constitute a showpiece of brilliant costumes, seductive rhythms and collective madness. On occasion, the prose becomes as overheated as the event: "Three million men and women ... shouted, drank, pinched one another, capered about and formed snakes of dancers that rolled up, unrolled, circled around a boy or a girl, squeezed him tight, touched him, aroused him, and then went off." But the scenes of guerrilla fighting and police repression are more persuasive than any pamphlet or videotape sent from either side of the South American struggles of politics and faith.

For decades, the landscape of subtropical disillusion has been so identified with one writer that it is commonly referred to as Greeneland. But Graham Greene's burnt-out cases are rapidly being replaced by Latin American protagonists and European figures who have a fresher story to tell. Detrez is still an unfinished writer, and he lacks the craft and polish of his great predecessor. But he has a sense of the appropriate image and the right valedictory tone.

Back at home, Conrad is once again engulfed in vegetation grown rank with lack of care. "With my hands," he recalls, "I made a breach in the thick curtain of asparagus ferns that tumbled down from the top of the wardrobe and floated like puffs of smoke between the floor and the ceiling." There, amid the old green plants that recall a painting by Henri Rousseau, he reflects upon the failures of religion and revolt. Fortunately for the writer of these bitter meditations, his current fiction has proved more promising than his past careers.