Onlookers At A Revolution PERSIAN NIGHTS

By Paul Gray

At least as far back as Sir Walter Scott's Waverley, novelists have been interested in setting imaginary characters loose against a background of authentic, tumultuous events. Small wonder. History is, after all, drama readymade, an endless pageant playing at all hours in the public domain. Writers who elect to fuse their private inventions with the collective memory of an actual past can create electrifying effects. Witness the towering achievements of War and Peace or the enduring popular appeal of Gone With the Wind. The formula has its pitfalls, of course, in the hands of the inept: cardboard people posing stiffly in front of papier-mache reconstructions. Even so, fiction that dovetails with fact remains alluring to authors and readers alike.

Persian Nights shows why. Author Diane Johnson's sixth novel transports a handful of Americans into Iran during the summer of 1978. These remarkably ordinary visitors have no way of knowing they have jetted into a maelstrom, a seething revolution that will soon topple the Shah, rearrange the balances of power and terror in the Middle East and seriously frazzle two successive American presidencies. But in hindsight from 1987, when all of this is known, anyone who was in Iran then, even only in make-believe, can be made to seem interesting.

Johnson's heroine is Chloe Fowler; she and Jeffrey, her husband of twelve years and a renowned thoracic surgeon, take off for a two-month visit to a medical school and hospital in Shiraz, where he will serve as a consultant and she will pursue a brief study of Sassanian pottery. Awaiting a connecting flight in London, Jeffrey learns of an emergency in his medical practice and decides to return to San Francisco. He urges Chloe to go on ahead without him; Sara and Max, their two small children, will be fine with the plans already made for their care back home, and Jeffrey will join her in Iran as soon as he can. Chloe agrees reluctantly but with a little thrill as well. She knows that another American visitor scheduled to appear in Shiraz is Dr. Hugh Monroe, with whom she has tentatively begun a love affair.

When Chloe arrives, odd woman out, Western and husbandless in the tight society of Iranian and American couples at the medical dormitories, she finds that Hugh is unaccountably missing. She takes pleasure in her disappointment: "With Hugh not there she could pay in advance for anticipated pleasures, pay by uncertainty, solitude, and serious study, in a land hostile to women, far from her children, in an ugly room. What destiny could then begrudge her just a little fling?" Such a question, in the context of Iran, turns out to be poignantly beside the point.

Chloe and Hugh do eventually meet and make love, but this romantic moment quickly pales beside other, pressing concerns. The hospital administrator assumes that Chloe is a spy. A weekend jaunt to a nearby cave yields a dying man and then, in short order, a corpse for which none of the local authorities will accept responsibility. Chloe begins to suspect Hugh of working for the CIA, and numerous new acquaintances of being informers for SAVAK, the Shah's secret police. She rashly hands over her passport to an Iranian woman who wants to break out of her arranged marriage to an older man, thus giving the young wife a chance to flee the country without her husband's knowledge or approval. Jeffrey writes from San Francisco, saying he has fallen in love with another woman and wants a divorce. When Chloe and a contingent of friends from the hospital pay a visit to the ancient city of Persepolis, they are treated to a night of terror as armed bands struggle mysteriously in the darkness. Assembling the next morning, the tourists discover that one of their number, an Iranian doctor, has been shot and killed. As they get ready to leave, Chloe has an insight: "Great dramas, your perspective on life, your life altered for all time and at the end you have to get into a car and drive home."

This tension between the broad sweep of history and the minutiae perceived by individuals caught in its rush keeps Persian Nights holding steady, well above the level of conventional romance. In lesser hands, the novel could easily have been called something like A Doctor's Wayward Wife in Iran, and been far more marketable in the bargain. But Johnson, 52, an English professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and a collaborator with Stanley Kubrick on the screenplay of The Shining, has found a middle ground between sensationalism and high seriousness. Chloe Fowler's good intentions provide a fascinating vantage point for the clash of irreconcilable cultures. She comes, unprepared, to a strange place, meaning no harm, believing that "life underneath is everywhere similar" and that "the Iranians are like us."

She is wrong, and she is often portrayed as preposterously silly and stupid. In creating such a selfish, flawed heroine, Johnson took a calculated risk: readers might not be able to see themselves and their prejudices through Chloe and make the appropriate adjustments toward the truth. The enterprise will leave some unsatisfied. Persian Nights is neither a bodice ripper nor a + treatise on the Iranian revolution, but an intriguing compromise: an attempt to show major upheavals as a progress of small shocks.