Nostalgia for Grace

THE AMBASSADOR by Morris L West. 275 pages. Morrow. $4.95.

Morris West's best novels merit serious attention because they grapple earnestly with the private truths of religious crisis. The Devil's Advocate approached greatness. It used a fascinating but hypothetical public issue--the ecclesiastical investigation into the life of a possible saint--as backdrop to the private spiritual agony of a middle-aged monsignor dying of cancer. Then West began to tinker dangerously with the balance between private and public; his novels increasingly seemed to offer the inside dope about decisions of state, competing for the attention due the internal truths of spiritual life. The Shoes of the Fisherman was published at the time of the election of Paul VI; its hero is a middle-aged archbishop who becomes Pope, and before the novel is done, his intimately described crisis of private conscience becomes a not-so-hypothetical crisis of world politics.

Roots of Decay. In The Ambassador, West has all but abandoned the hypothetical. Once again his hero is the middle-aged man of intelligence and high attainment who is facing his psychological climacteric. Maxwell Gordon Amberley is a career Foreign Service officer and Old Far Eastern hand. While he was serving in Japan, his wife died and he became a convert to Zen Buddhism: such are the personal roots of his spiritual crisis and subsequent breakdown. But the personal story of Amberley is far overshadowed by the public story of the American official, for as the action starts, Amberley is named U.S. Ambassador to South Viet Nam.

The South Viet Nam of the novel is governed by "President Cung," who is the double of the late Ngo Dinh Diem; an army coup against him is brewing. It is Amberley's job to bring the fiercely independent Cung and his policies under U.S. control or, failing that, to back the army coup. After open negotiations and private appeals with an obbligato of CIA skulduggery, Amberley does fail with President Cung; the coup does take place exactly along the lines of the one that deposed and murdered Diem.

Was U.S. policy correct? Did Amberley carry it out wisely? Or was he to blame for impetuosity and arrogance that made it impossible for Cung to cooperate--and thus did he cause Cung's death? If Amberley had behaved more in accord with his own inner vision of his true Zen self, would the outcome have been different? Crushed between the millstones of public events and his private convictions of failure, Amberley agonizes in self-doubt, comes near to "psychotic" collapse, at length quits public life to find peace in a Zen monastery.

Religious Alarums. Almost from the beginning, the reader is writhing in doubt too, but of another kind. Author West is an Australian, widely traveled in the Far East, who knew Ngo Dinh Diem and came to admire him. "Cung," visualized as a remote and complex man, is a half-created shadow who is nonetheless the only real hero of the book.

As for the Americans, the best of them--conspicuously excepting the amoral, opportunistic CIA chief--are not merely questioning U.S. policy in Viet Nam and probing for the causes of failure, but are convinced at heart that the U.S. course is wrong. Whatever else it may be, West's novel is clearly a celebration of the dead Diem, and a political tract reflecting a strong viewpoint.

As a tract, the novel's message is that U.S. connivance at the ousting and murder of Diem was immoral, unwise, and possibly fatal to all further hope of saving South Viet Nam for the West. All these points are certainly arguable and may well even be true. But West does not argue them. The crippling difficulty with the book is that it assumes what it pretends to prove, offering the illusion but not the substance of illumination.

Twitches & Jumps. Only by the end, however, does the most fundamental doubt emerge. The Ambassador claims to be a variant of that novel of religious crisis that West has written before. But this time the claim is spurious. Though Maxwell Amberley twitches and jumps to plenty of religious alarums, the genuine spiritual conflicts never quite make it onto the stage. Instead, big worldly events distract the reader from his wholly justified suspicion that the business of the soul is being carried on in false coin.

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