Rambling Road

By J.F.O. McAllister

TRIBES WITH FLAGS by Charles Glass

Atlantic Monthly Press

510 pages; $22.95

Charles Glass, an American journalist with Lebanese roots, watched the U.S. Navy off Beirut in 1983 and concluded that, like the Genoese and Pisan fleets aiding the Crusaders eight centuries earlier, it would soon sail home in ignorance and frustration. Lebanon and neighboring Syria, Israel, Jordan and Iraq, he argues, are "tribes with flags" rather than nations. Try as big powers might to control them with armies, navies and imported ideologies, the ties of "family, village, tribe and sect" have been much tougher.

In 1987, seeking to absorb and understand the power of those ties and the "splendour and desolation" of the land, Glass set out from Alexandretta, now in southern Turkey, to Aqaba in Jordan, following the invasion path used by Alexander the Great and the Crusaders. His odyssey ended abruptly when a peculiarly modern kind of tribe, the Hizballah, kidnaped and held him hostage in Beirut for two months until his escape. The trip is the framework for this book. He describes it as a "literary and spiritual ramble through the history of a troubled land." It is really a travelogue, letting us see through Glass's omnivorous eye for detail what the author-wanderer experienced each day.

This format perhaps flowed from Glass's view that the people of the Levant, like peace in Lebanon, cannot be neatly packaged; thus the only way to convey any true sense of them is to transmit their stories at length and in profusion. The result is a huge number of trees, many lovely, that never become a forest. Interlocutors both fascinating and tedious, mundane sight- seeing jaunts and profound observations, telling vignettes and pointless collections of detail are all jumbled together in a work too long by half. Good questions are posed but not answered. Glass himself remains strangely opaque, a formless conduit, until the account of his captivity. At first his prayers sought to bargain God into releasing him; later he tried "to make myself known to God, asking less, offering more." But to his readers, Glass has not offered enough of the analysis and synthesis needed to transform sharp observation into enlightenment.