Green Hell

DEATH IN THAT GARDEN (310 pp.)--Jose Andre Lacour--Rinehart ($3.95).

When Belgian-born Author Jose Andre Lacour outlined his Death in That Garden, he found himself at a writer's disadvantage. The setting was the upper reaches of Amazonia, but Lacour had never been there. So he left his home near Paris and spent three months in Brazil; including ten days on the Amazon--though quite comfortably on a friend's yacht. When his novel was published, one French critic flatly hailed it as "one of the masterworks of his generation." It is not that, but it is still one of the grimmest stories in some time of man's greed, his search for love, and his search for God. Readers had better take warning. Death in That Garden has its victories, but they are of the spirit. The bodies of its characters are shockingly served.

At last, the adventurers in the jungle town of Cuchazu have struck it rich--diamonds, diamonds, diamonds. But they never cash in. The government steps in and takes over the diggings for the state. Troops arrive to make the decree stick, and the hard-drinking prospectors, dregs of all nations, begin to talk about a revolt. When the posturing troop commander decides to execute one of his corporals for picking up some gems, a nightmarish wave of violence washes over the filthy mining town. Six people escape, board a small native boat and head into the jungle. One is a priest, another a former German army captain, who subsists mainly on the bitterness of his country's defeat. There is a French Jew at the end of his rope, a money-adoring Belgian, who is accompanied by his eleven-year-old deaf-mute daughter and the French prostitute he is engaged to marry. With them goes the commander of the soldiers, fleeing a situation beyond his control.

This is obviously the kind of fertile fictional earth just right for the tall corn. To Author Lacour's credit, he does not overcultivate the acres. When Chark, the German, tells them of his plan to search for a gold-carrying plane that has crashed, all agree to stick together. Ridiculously ill-equipped, they begin a journey whose terrors bring out the best and worst in them all. Starving, sick, half-crazed, they stumble along after the German, take turns carrying the child and the box of crucifixes that the priest intends for native Indians. The ceaseless procession of horrors is almost too much--but not quite. Author Lacour tips his pen with a searching probe of each character's deepest self. The priest, in his own eyes not a very good one, finally catches a glimmer of grace through sacrifice. The German and the Jew, in the only sticky pages of the book, discover the brotherhood of man, and so on through the cast.

Ironically, they find the gold, but by then any one of them would have traded his share for a tin of beans. First to die is the child; then, in some of the most dreadful descriptions in recent fiction, the others go. Only the former commander of the soldiers is left, and he is reduced to cannibalism. With all its obvious symbolism, its irony, its implicit plea for man's humanity to man, Death in That Garden will best be remembered as a tale of adventure brought off with literary flair and an almost savage imagination.

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