God & Woman
SON OF DUST (288 pp.) -- H. F. M. Presco//--Macm/7/an ($.3.75).
Fulcun Geroy is damned as only a man can be who passionately loves both God and woman. The lord of Montgaudri, a fief on the borders of 11th century Normandy, Fulcun spends the opening chapter trying to nerve himself to ravish a comely peasant girl. But when he finally decides to act, he discovers that the girl has already been raped by his loutish younger brother. In rage and remorse, Fulcun "hated the whole of human kind.
He knew now . . . how God must hate the vile and shameful flesh."
His next, and most lasting, torment is Aide, the wife of Mauger of Fervacques. They fall in love at the court of William the Conqueror, and Fulcun is plunged once more into Hamlet-like indecision.
He has three chances to kill Mauger--once in battle and twice in duels--but fumbles each opportunity. He kidnaps Aide but soon infects her with his own goading conscience, and. out of pity and a conviction of sin, she returns to her battered husband. Fulcun carries his passion about like a plague and involves all his kinsmen in his ruin.
Throughout, Fulcun pursues God as closely as he does Aide. He goes barefoot to a hostile bishop to escape excommunication. He becomes a novitiate monk. But God, like the woman, will not have him as a servitor, and he retreats at last to a ramshackle hut on the coast of Brittany to live in humble poverty. This, seemingly, is his final penance, for Aide comes to him: "She took his hand, and they went on together to the hayfield through the cool heavy dew ..."
First published in England 25 years ago, Son of Dust is laced with the sort of distinctive, evocative writing that has marked Author Prescott's more ambitious and accomplished works, e.g.,, Mary Tudor (TIME, Nov. 23, 1953) and Man on a Donkey (TIME, Sept. 22, 1952). But it is marred by a preening pedantry that too often finds Fulcun leaning on his quillons, sitting on a faldstool, glancing out of a dorter window or camping out on his alod--without benefit of definitions.-