Double Crosses THE COLOR OF BLOOD

By Pico Iyer

Church and state enjoy, at the best of times, a somewhat uneasy balance of power. In Communist Europe, where a fierce sense of religious tradition coexists with a firm sense of political exigency, the mighty opposites struggle within an especially complex marriage of convenience. The frictions between their competing claims are felt most urgently perhaps by the powers at the head of the church. Divided loyalties become a double cross to bear.

Such are the tensions that animate The Color of Blood, Brian Moore's 16th novel. The setting here is the rather '60s-ish cold-war zone of Central Europe, an anonymously rainy, grainy place of black limousines and border checkpoints. But Moore's decidedly up-to-the-minute subject, invoking issues as topical as liberation theology and the Solidarity movement in Poland, is % the way in which a religious leader in a political world separates good causes from mixed motives. As Moore's protagonist, Cardinal Stephen Bem, asks an aide, "Are we filling the churches because we love God more than before? Or do we do it out of nostalgia for the past, or, worse, to defy the government? Because if we do . . . then God is mocked."

Though this may sound like Graham Greene land, Moore does not often linger over moral debates or digressions. Within a few pages of the novel's opening, Bem has been attacked by would-be assassins, abducted by men who claim to be protecting him and, having made his escape, reduced to the status of a fugitive in rags who fears for his life and does not know where he will be safe. As he descends into the underworld, haunted by undercover agents and herded from truck to shadowy truck, the highest cleric in the land finds himself in touch for the first time with the masses he claims to represent. He also finds himself increasingly, and in every way, in the dark.

Indeed, Bem has nothing but his faith to guide him through a maze in which every side is trying to frame every other, and terrorists emulate the tyrants they deplore. Is he being menaced by the sinister "raincoats" of the government or by the radicals within his own church? Who is threatened most by his unbending faith? What is the price of compromise? And who is using whom, and why? The confusion is only deepened as Bem meets government officials who are as kind as clergymen, and churchmen as murderous as politicians.

Moore races the reader through a series of crepuscular turns with the smooth efficiency of a Mercedes on a rain-slicked street at night. The quiet operations of secret intelligence are this novel's method as well as its theme. And though The Color of Blood may, in the end, seem lean to the point of thinness, one can almost see, as the pressure mounts toward a palpitating climax, the closing credits rise above a seamless and thoroughly gripping motion picture.