Sibling Rivalry

THE BROTHERS M (512 pp.)--Tom Stacey--Pantheon ($5.95).

As foreign correspondent for the Sunday Times of London, English-born Author Tom Stacey, 31, knows the depths and shallows of African politics. As a trained anthropologist (The Hostile Sun), he has a strong sense of what it must be like to live in a primitive society, and also the dangers facing the educated African who defies both Europe and his tribal past. It is this last theme--rather than a sampling of the yeasty brew of independence--that Novelist Stacey has drawn on for this deeply felt and disturbing first novel.

The "brothers" are an oddly matched pair of students at Oxford: stocky, crew-cut Bob McNair from Canada and tall, black Daudi Mukasa from Uganda. Both view the great world of Europe with the eyes of provincials, but where McNair sees purpose and proportion, Mukasa finds only disillusionment and decay. It is one of the book's first ironies that Mukasa, who rejects Europe, is more successful in terms of popularity and girls than McNair, who loves it.

Ratty Huts. But when both young men meet again in Africa, the tables are turned. McNair unwillingly inherits the mantle of white superiority, while Mukasa, despite his Oxford degree, is just another black in the opinion of white settlers and primitive tribesmen. Author Stacey sends the "brothers" off on a long expedition to soaring, snow-crested Ruwenzori, the fabled Mountains of the Moon. As they fight their way through bamboo forests and up mist-shrouded crags, the clash of culture, personality and race is heightened.

Nights, the two men lie in rat-infested village huts, hating each other. Days, they struggle on in a chorus of mutual complaint. Without quite meaning to, McNair takes over the physical and mental leadership. Mukasa regresses into a childish envy. He steals McNair's fountain pen, notebook and aspirin, or perversely argues that Africans are obviously "inferior" to Europeans. McNair is at last goaded into shouting at Mukasa, "You god-damned black monkey!"

Illegal Short Cut. The indignities mount. Mukasa's long-sought aunt, the twin sister of his dead mother, proves to be a filthy, half-mad old woman who has been driven from the tribe as a witch. To save her wretched life, McNair risks taking an illegal short cut through the Belgian Congo. They are swiftly arrested. McNair, as a white man, is quartered with the Belgian officers, but Mukasa gets slapped around by the hard-eyed police and thrown into a jail crammed with demented African cultists. Engineering an escape, McNair brings them all to a greater doom: abandonment for the half-mad aunt, betrayal for McNair and death for Mukasa. Stacey's message is a paradox: "To die is not to have been defeated, to live is not a conquering." In time, he suggests, understanding will be gained. But first, it seems clear, many Mukasas--and some McNairs--must pay the cost in blood.

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