Light & Impolite

THE FIG TREE (192 pp.) -- Aubrey Menen -- Scribner ($3.50).

"There are three things which are real," Indian-Irish Author Aubrey Menen once wrote, "God, human folly, and laughter. Since the first two pass our comprehension, we must do what we can with the third." Urbane Satirist Menen has siphoned laughter out of stuffy pukka sahibs (The Prevalence of Witches') and sacred Hindu myths (The Ramayana). Rarely has his comic touch been lighter or more impolite than in this current spoof on science and sex.

Fig Tree's hero Harry Wesley is an English Nobel-prizewinning biologist with a yen to help humanity. His secret weapon is desoxyribonucleic acid. Injected into a plant or tree, this chemical will increase phenomenally the size and quality of the yield. An enterprising Italian government official named Pozzo feels that this is just the cure for the barren poverty of southern Italy. Above the Bay of Salerno, on some terraced soil blessed by Pozzo's cardinal uncle, Harry Wesley sets out to grow a super-fig.

His closest neighbor is a rich and really quiet American. Joe Bellman, who looks like "Edward Gibbon, parboiled," has not opened a book in 20 years, simply lolls in the sea and sun, and only worries how his next meal is coming, culinarily speaking. When the doctored fruit reaches grapefruit-size, Gourmet Joe poaches a fig. "This is how things tasted to Adam," he tells his maid delightedly, "before Eve introduced him to ignobler pleasures and spoiled his palate for ever more."

But like Adam's apple, Wesley's fig has an unforeseen side effect: it is an aphrodisiac. The late naughty-witted Thorne (Turnabout) Smith might have fashioned some of the priapic victories that follow. Countesses, nurses and simple country girls are figtimized. When the secret gets out, it is an affair of church and state. Charges of scandal and nepotism rock the Vatican. After a sly display of irreverence, Author Menen turns soberside to point an improbably tedious moral: "Scientists are, by and large, up to no good . . . We stand in danger of having our lives twisted, our souls and our bodies destroyed, by men who boast that they are above right and wrong."

Except for this flatulent postscript, Author Menen's sprightly wit and stylish prose make The Fig Tree the choicest summer reading of the winter.

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