The Damned

By Melvin Maddocks

POLONAISE

by PIERS PAUL READ

347 pages. Lippincott. $10.

If Dostoyevsky were reincarnated as an Englishman, he might write novels like Piers Paul Read. His books are packed with demons perceived as the rattling of a vicar's teacups, clubrooms full of failed saints and even failed sinners, all wearing the old school tie. In short, crime and, above all, punishment during a weekend on a Cornwall estate.

In his sixth novel Read has traveled abroad and into history for a theme, attempting to write what could be thought of as his Brothers Karamazov, Polish-style. Stefan Kornowski -saint, sinner, intellectual -is Alyosha-Dmitri-Ivan all in one. The son of a ruined count, he moves into a shabby Warsaw apartment when the family country home is lost in the late 1920s. But while his sister, 17, goes to work in a jeweler's shop, Stefan, 15, manages the ultimate Dostoyevskian luxury: "Playing the role of the sort of person he ought to be." He dabbles in religious speculation (largely gloomy), flirts with Communism (almost, but not quite, of course, making it to the Spanish Civil War), and languidly backs into a comfortable marriage. A spectator of life, naturally he becomes a writer and, for a while, a fashionable one -a protege of a princess.

As he idles in ennui over his coy stories and precious plays, what can Stefan do to rouse himself from his cursed dilettantism? Like a true Karamazov, he contemplates an ideally perverse murder involving the princess's pubescent daughter. He is saved by, among other things, World War II, which -rest assured -he sits out in the U.S., selling books in a shop in Chicago while his wife and twins are killed by the Nazis. Twenty years later Stefan returns to Europe to commit a romantic crime, have a religious revelation and die.

It is all too easy to gauge how far Read's reach has exceeded his grasp. In less than 350 pages he has stretched to cover a family saga of three generations, on location in Poland and France, with side trips to Spain, the U.S. and England. He has encapsulated the causes and consequences of one depression and two wars, not to mention their fury. As a philosopher-novelist he has tried to see to it that all the Great Ideas are discussed: Christianity, Marxism, Art, Love, Innocence and Corruption.

In his one nonfiction book, Alive:

The Story of the Andes Survivors, Read inherited his Dostoyevskian themes as a gift. A remote plane crash, the compel ling temptation to cannibalism, all this extremity allowed him to make the most of his favorite question: How can a man manage to survive without being damned? Beside this bestselling documentary. Read's novels so far have seemed all too contrived. But there is courage along with foolhardiness here, seriousness as well as pretension. Over extended though he is, Read writes for the most part with grace and economy.

He has the exceptional novelist's gift for making a reader believe in a character's predicaments even when he may not be lieve in the character.

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