Birth Pangs

By Paul Gray

THE KING OF THE FIELDS

Written and Translated by Isaac Bashevis Singer

Farrar Straus & Giroux 244 pages; $18.95

At age 84, Isaac Bashevis Singer continues to astonish. The King of the Fields is his second book of 1988. (The Death of Methuselah, a collection of stories, was published in April.) And this new novel, his first in five years, radically departs from nearly all his previous fiction. This time out, the setting is not a remote Polish village, the streets and cafes of Warsaw, or the expatriate haunts of Manhattan. "The story begins -- when?" This opening sentence is the Nobel laureate's typically no-nonsense way of announcing a narrative that will unfold in an indeterminate past.

The Lesniks, a small tribe of hunter-gatherers, have been conquered by a marauding band of Poles, whose leader, Krol Rudy, wants to establish an agricultural base to feed his vision of a unified Polish nation. Those Lesniks who escaped the butchery of the invasion hide in the neighboring mountains, gathering strength for a counterattack. But Cybula, their elder, receives a peace offering. Cybula has his doubts, not only about his enemy's intentions but about the new way of life posed by the prospect of tilling the fields: "It was not necessary to tickle and scratch Mother Earth to make her produce."

Cybula nonetheless accepts the olive branch and brings most of his followers down from the mountain. Then culture shocks begin in earnest. A Jewish shoemaker arrives in the settlement, bearing strange tales of distant lands, the idea of one all-powerful God, and the methods of reading and writing. A Christian missionary appears. The women, tired of being routinely raped and brutalized, stage a revolution. Cybula, wearied by so much violence and change, pledges allegiance to Shmiercz, the god of death.

Singer's subject is nothing less than the birth pangs of civilization, as seen through the eyes of an intelligent but innocent victim of progress. And the writing -- terse, colloquial, evocative -- makes this ambitious history lesson seem an enchanting evening around a fireside.