Collision Of Cultures

By John Skow

TITLE: FATHERS AND CROWS

AUTHOR: WILLIAM T. VOLLMANN

PUBLISHER: VIKING; 990 PAGES; $30

THE BOTTOM LINE: The second bleak volume in a relentlessly pessimistic novel cycle about the coming of white men to North America.

At the age of 32, novelist William Vollmann displays the exasperating immaturities of a precocious teenager. He is a self-mythologizer who refers to himself with heavy irony as "William the Blind." He is utterly and humorlessly self-absorbed and believes his own sensibility to be unique. He rolls out for display every nut and grain that he has squirreled.

Given this, and a good deal more that is off-putting, Viking deserves much credit for taking on the titanic seven-novel cycle that Vollmann calls Seven Dreams: A Book of North American Landscapes. The theme is mighty -- the repeated collisions between European and Native American cultures -- and perhaps no one with a realistic view of what is possible would have attempted it. But Vollmann's long and relentless chronicle is worth the patience it requires.

The cycle's first volume was The Ice-Shirt, a brooding narration of the settling of Greenland and Vinland. Fathers and Crows has six glossaries, endless footnotes, maps and epigraphs, a 47-page biography of St. Ignatius Loyola and nearly 1,000 pages. It relates Jesuit efforts to convert Huron and Iroquois Indians in the early 17th century, but the author prepares his narration so thoroughly that major characters are not introduced before the book's tardy midpoint.

This gloomy and roughly powerful novel is not a politically correct sermon on cultural diversity. There are no heroes of tolerance here, native or otherwise, although Vollmann grudgingly admires Samuel de Champlain, the stodgy soldier who founded Quebec. French lay explorers craved beaver pelts. The priestly black gowns wore hair shirts and spiked girdles in self- mortification, and lusted to harvest souls. They strove to break down native sexual and religious customs, but, as Vollmann tells it, were more tolerant of the Indians' prolonged and joyous ritual torture of captured enemies. Tribes sold their souls (literally) as dearly as possible, in return for iron hatchets, copper cook pots, measles and smallpox, a few guns and, rather late in the game, brandy. When they could, they caught the Jesuits and tortured them, thus increasing the clerics' chances of canonization. (Pere Jean de Brebeuf, one of the murdered Jesuits, was made a saint in 1930).

The black gowns returned the favor. Catherine Tekakwitha, a 24-year-old Iroquois virgin who died of self-mortification in 1680, having been convinced that her animal nature was sinful and must be scourged, was declared blessed by Pope John Paul II three centuries later. So ends a chronicle in which fanaticism and torture become indistinguishable. And in which the most fully rounded character is that of the obsessed and eccentric author, interrupting himself constantly with marginal ironies and references to his own 20th century travels, looking on in fascination and disgust, and wishing all dogmatists, as he says in his dedication, "a warm stay in Hell."