The World's a Stage

^THE STRAW MAN (461 pp.)--Jean Giono--Knopf ($5).

In 1848, the 19th century's great year of revolutions, Milan staged its famed Five Days' revolt against the Austrian rulers of northern Italy. Stepping out into the clamorous street, Hussar Colonel Angelo Pardi, youthful hero of Jean Giono's new novel, suddenly saw his fellow patriots like actors on a stage--officers strutting by, each with "a finger to his mustache as if to the trigger of a gun"; women's handkerchiefs fluttering from every balcony; grand carriages pulling aside to allow a princess in "working-class petticoats" to lead past a troop of volunteers. And Angelo himself was an actor in the play--without knowing it. Men, argues French Author Giono, can achieve real ends only by being theatrically inspired--and cold, cunning leaders take care to pile on theater aplenty.

An earlier Giono novel, The Horseman on the Roof (TIME, Feb. 1, 1954), showed how young Angelo had lived through a cholera epidemic and learned how theatrically men often behave in the face of death. What he still does not know, for all his experience, is that he is the hand-picked tool of some shrewd leftist Italian conspirators--political stage managers who are using him to inspire and excite the crowd. To the conspirators, Angelo is a mere straw man whose ultimate "destiny is to be burned. "All that is asked of him," says a plump rebel plotter named Bon-dino, "is to make a lot of smoke . . . under cover of which we can get to work."

In a landscape swarming with Austrian soldiers and two-faced informers, handsome Angelo performs one brilliant, noble deed after another, soon wins himself a cheering public. Even before his stature has become "heroic," his bosses maneuver a neat fix: Angelo must be killed and enshrined as a national martyr. Instead, in a duel, innocent Angelo spits his enemy through the gizzard and continues to thrive. His bosses keep on hoping, when he is ordered to blow up an Austrian powder store and burn the fodder of the enemy cavalry. Instead of perishing superbly in the attempt, Angelo just does the job very efficiently--and comes prancing back for more, as insatiable for adventure as Don Quixote, as indestructible as the comic hero of an old one-reeler.

Author Giono's theme is as complicated as it is fascinating. Most of the characters think they are acting like real people, but they are in fact propelled by theatrical impulses, and are acting out a glamorous melodrama entitled "Liberty"; as a result, it is often impossible for the reader to know what is actually happening. Nor does Author Giono try much to clarify this Pirandelloesque confusion, which he obviously regards as a principal factor of human life--fantastic but unresolvable. Impossible to plumb in small details, The Straw Man, with its superbly painted backdrops of Italian cities and countryside, is unforgettable in terms of grand opera.

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