The Deluge Revisited

TWO BY TWO by David Garnett. 144 pages. Atheneum. $3.50.

Elaboration of ancient fables has always been a fascinating literary exercise--particularly because a fable, if it is classic, sends the imagination soaring far beyond its own spare telling. Thomas Mann got four dense volumes out of exploring the emotional and theocratic implications of a few chapters in the Bible describing Joseph's sojourn in Egypt. With less weight but more easy charm, British Author David Garnett has done the same thing with the story of Noah and his ark.

Garnett's heroines are 14-year-old twin sisters, Fan and Niss, who have managed to stow away aboard the ark. Noah is a bearded, wine-guzzling patriarch who, during 20 years of building the ark, has never lost faith that he "walked with God." When the townspeople jeer him, Noah thunders: "God will sweep you all away, but He loves me and my children for we are His servants."

Then, as G. K. Chesterton put it:

The cataract of the cliff of heaven fell blinding off the brink

As if it would wash the stars away as suds go down a sink . . .

In the sisters' airless quarters with the animals, the stench becomes overpowering, but outside the smell is worse: surrounding the bobbing ark is an endless expanse of bloated, rotting human corpses. Once, the ark floats over what must have been a large city, for "the inhabitants had surfaced with much of their household furniture: there were tables, chairs, bedsteads, washtubs . . ." When the ark at last comes to rest on Mount Ararat, the twins slip away with one of Noah's grandsons, Gomer, into a lonely and devastated world.

British Author Garnett insists that his novel "was conceived as a frivolous gloss upon the most charming story in the Bible." But he concedes that "a parable kept pushing its way in." The nightmarish horror surrounding the ark, he suggests, conjures up the specter of modern-day thermonuclear destruction. And Noah collaborated with God in the destruction of all other life, leading to the question of how many potential nuclear-age Noahs, who fancy they have a direct line to God, are extant.

Surveying the sea of corpses, Niss asks: "What's Noah getting out of it?" "Everything," answers Fan. "An obscure drunkard in a hick town in Palestine whom everyone laughed at has his revenge on his neighbors, and becomes the sole progenitor of the world to be. You can't beat that."

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