Devil's Due

By Paul Gray

FREDDY'S BOOK

by John Gardner

Knopf; 246 pages; $10

No novel was ever harmed by an irresistible beginning. Freddy's Book, Author John Gardner's eighth novel, is a case in point. While riding the lecture circuit in the Midwest, Professor Jack Winesap meets a strange old historian with a stranger pronouncement: "I have a son who's a monster." Winesap accepts an invitation to the man's house, arrives at an isolated and crumbling old estate during a blizzard, and is promptly snowed in for the night. After some suspenseful dawdling, the host allows his guest to visit Freddy, a young man who stands some 8 ft. tall. The bars on the windows of his room and the locks on his door have been put there by Freddy. They keep a hostile, jeering world at bay, allowing the giant to bury himself in books and solitude, preventing intrusions from the outside that have, in the past, provoked him to tantrums of awesome violence. As Winesap settles down for the night in a frigid guest bedroom, he hears heavy footsteps approaching his door.

And that is the end of the irresistible beginning. Freddy's mission is not to tear Winesap limb from limb or to discuss how it feels to be taken for a monster. Rather, he drops a bulky manuscript of his own composition inside the room and stomps off. The rest of Freddy 's Book is just that: Freddy's book. Gardner has used the device of a novel within a novel before, most successfully in his widely praised October Light (1976), but this time he refuses to provide the other half of the framing tale: Winesap, Freddy, his father and all the complications suggested by their meeting simply disappear.

Thwarted expectations make for grumpy readers, and Freddy's manuscript, a rather dry narrative of political intrigue in 16th century Scandinavia, does not seem calculated to appease them. The chief antagonists to emerge from much torchlit huggermugger are Lars-Goren, an idealistic Swedish knight, and the Devil, who decides to help Lars-Goren's kins man Gustav overthrow the occupying Danes and become King of Sweden. Satan's motive is chiefly to perpetuate unrest and chaos. History, after all, has been running on his side: "Magellan had recently circled the globe, opening vast new avenues for greed and war. Europe had more mad kings than sane, and the Devil had both the One True Church and the infant Protestant Revolution in the palm of his hand. In Germany, the very ideas that had filled him with alarm, when they'd broken out in Wittenberg, were now the occasion of such dissension and slaughter that it was a mystery to the Devil that he hadn't introduced them himself."

Hence Lars-Goren's dilemma: how to work for a presumed good (the liberation of his homeland) while being energetically assisted by the archetype of evil. This problem leads to further questions, most of them posed by Bishop Brask, an unscrupulous and despairing Swedish prelate. Could it be that "every thing's the work of the Devil"? What if "God himself is a Devil's lie"? Is the term might makes right "profoundly true? Suppose that there is in fact no good in the world except that which survives. " How is it possible to act according to the "commandments of a god who had not spoken to anyone sane for 15 centuries"?

Such disputations form the meat of this story as well as the skeleton; Gard ner consistently emphasizes ideas over incidents, ethics over events. Yet he does so without becoming preachy. His medieval characters must live and act in a world as theologically muddled as the present; the difference between them and the people encountered in much contemporary fiction is that they believe the labyrinth of morality will yield the proper path of behavior. Freddy 's Book does not quite find that way; it tells too little while arguing too much. Yet its failure to satisfy is almost offset by its power to disturb.

--Paul Gray

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