THE SUNLIGHT DIALOGUES

Metaphysical novelist Gardner has traveled from ancient Greece (The Wreckage of Agathon, 1970) and Beowulf (Grendel, 1971) to contemporary upstate N.Y., this time with a variegated cast which reflects the heat of the central dialogue like shattered glass. This confrontation takes place in Batavia between Clumly, the town's hapless and hairless police chief, and a madman/magician — "The Sunlight Man," a transmogrified member of the old Batavian Hodges family. "After God's withdrawal.... the ancient mechanism which made prophets arise should continue working" — hence the Sunlight Man who hits the break-up of the kingdom (symbolized by an American dynastic ethos) at the core of its flickering retreat. This would be the police, "the power failure...the black gap between the Actual and the Ideal." The prophet pursues Clumly relentlessly, while performing magic, directing murders through his Calaban, a sullen young Indian, punishing the Hodges, and talking, talking, talking of illusions, justice (and its opposite, law), of gods and men, of marriage and madness. Under the burden of a "monstrous righteousness" and humanity's delusions, "let every man know from moment to moment who he is." Eventually the several Hodges and others on the rim of the cauldron do know and recognize the terror, the emptiness of their universe — merely individual drum beats and the grinding of "invisible knives." Among those responding to the magician's sermons and demonstrations are some startling originals: a neat, respectable thief soothed by poetry; a bizarre civil rights worker; two desiccated crones; and some rather likable cops. At the dose, poor Clumly, after the death of the Sunlight Man occasioned by his final self-knowledge, tries to make sense of it all. He doesn't of course, except to wonder at "democracy...a huge aluminium dome made out of a million beams, and not a single beam is responsible." A complex and difficult fable of curiously American relevance; a book of bleak humors and raw surprises which mine — and sometimes undermine — the fictional ground with speculative brilliance.