Prophet of Doom

HEARKEN UNTO THE VOICE -- Franz Werfel-- Viking ($3).

In The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, Franz Werfel wrote a novel that was at once an account of an extraordinary military operation, a story of a successful resistance to tyranny, a tribute to simple religious fervor. Containing more heavily mystical passages than most best-sellers (total sales 158,000 copies), it made up for them with excellent descriptions of well-planned, hard-fought, hand-to-hand battles. Moreover, it had the inherent excitement of a struggle in which a hopelessly outnumbered force decides to fight, turns on its enemy and wins.

Hearken unto the Voice has many of these qualities. But it also has more mysticism and fewer fights, and in them victory goes to the bigger army. A strange book, only a few hundred pages shorter than Gone With the Wind, it takes place in an instant in time and is probably the longest work ever written about the happenings of a split second.

The second splits when Clayton Reeves, a near-sighted English writer, whose father was Jewish, enters the Mosque of Omar, on the site of the Temple in Jerusalem. Three weeks before, Reeves's wife had died in Egypt. A sympathetic friend dragged him on a painful tour of the Holy Land -- painful because Reeves's grief deepened in the grim and melancholy country and because he felt one of his rare epileptic attacks coming on. As he entered the Temple he felt dizzy, leaned on a pillar for support, realized he was fainting and looked at his watch. It was 23 minutes to six. That incident takes place on page 49 of Hearken unto the Voice. On page 775 Reeves is still looking at his watch and the time is still 23 minutes to six.

The intervening 726 pages are only indirectly Reeves's story. In that instant there leaps into his mind the tormented figure of Jeremiah, the prophet of doom, who in the reign of King Josiah had leaned against a pillar in the Temple and stared at a leather amulet on his wrist as Reeves had stared at his wrist watch. The rest of the story is really Jeremiah's. It follows him back to his lonely childhood outside Jerusalem, through his exile, apostasy, agony, to his final peace. His wife, like Reeves's wife, had died in Egypt. Because he would not tell kings or commoners what they wanted to believe, he was imprisoned, hunted as a spy, nearly killed. When Jerusalem was laid waste, his last request --that he be allowed to follow the children of Israel into captivity--was refused, and Jeremiah wandered alone through the burning city, into the desecrated Temple, until he found in the terrible ruin the assurance he could not find in its days of glory.

Brought out a week before the publication of the last volumes of Thomas Mann's story of Joseph, Hearken unto the Voice resembles it only in its underlying theme. Where Mann's novel is subtle and slow-paced, Werfel's is melodramatic and tempestuous. It may well be more popular than Mann's four-volume masterpiece. With most of its characters black & white sketches, Hearken unto the Voice rises to the heights of great literature only in the passages (which Author Werfel has lifted from the Old Testament) where the prophet thunders his denunciations of the evils of the world.

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