Mixed Fiction

THE PROPHET, by Sholem Asch (343 pp.; Putnam; $4) is the work of an expert at making a good thing out of the Good Book. As the high priest of the Neo-Apocrypha or Bible-improvement school of writing, Sholem Asch, 75, has racked up sales of more than 1,000,000 by gilding such subjects as the lives of Christ (The Nazarene), St. Paul (The Apostle), Mary and Moses. This time Asch has raided the Bible for the story of the second Isaiah, who roused the Jews out of their Babylonian captivity.* The book's religious message is swaddled in what Hollywood calls "production values," e.g., a 3-D tour of Nebuchadnezzar's Palace of the Hanging Gardens in Babylon, the orgiastic rites of a harlot votary of the goddess Ishtar ("Her breasts were encased in golden bowls"), Belshazzar's feast at which a disembodied hand dooms King and country with the famed handwriting on the wall.

Among the gauds and gods of sinful Babylon, the young and earnest Isaiah is a prophet without honor or glamour. Beaten and spit upon, the visionary nonetheless convinces a hard core of the faithful that Babylon will be overthrown and the Jews restored to their ancient homeland. At novel's end, the first of the Jews are on the homeward march. Occasionally moving in his hours of trial, Asch's man of God often seems less the eloquent, God-intoxicated psalm-singer of the great Biblical text ("Awake, awake, put on thy strength, O Zion . . .") than a bearded positive thinker doling out pep talks to the dispirited.

THE DAY OF THE FOX, by Norman Lewis (249 pp.; Rinehart; $3), brilliantly tells about a war of nerves in a Spanish village on the Costa Brava 16 years after the end of Spain's civil war. Its central character is Sebastian Costa, a fisherman who was unwillingly conscripted into the Franco army and decorated for an act of bravery he did not really perform. The village Republicans, who have neither forgiven nor forgotten the war, still subject Costa to a cold, polite but unrelenting boycott. When someone betrays a Republican agent sent from France, the village instantly, and without a hearing, condemns Costa.

The book makes its points with slashing impact in scenes as sharply etched as the sun-baked houses under the savage Spanish sun. English Author Lewis is as carefully dispassionate as Spain's Jose Maria Gironella in The Cypresses Believe in God, which massively documented the forces that carried Spain toward civil war (TIME, April 18). Lewis shows that in their hearts both sides have become tired of the stubbornly continuing conflict. The revolutionary has begun to suspect the motives of the revolution, the chief of police is sick of police power. In the end, Author Lewis seems to echo the policeman's plea: "Let's hear no more about Reds or Falangists either. Haven't we as a people the greatness of heart to admit it's possible we were both wrong?"

*Practically nothing is known about him. The first 39 chapters of the book of Isaiah are largely attributed to "the first Isaiah," who died long before the Babylonian captivity (which began in 597 B.C.). Most Biblical scholars consider the next 15 chapters of the book of Isaiah the work of a great unknown.

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