Books: Amazonian Advent

AT PLAY IN THE FIELDS OF THE LORD by Peter Matthiessen. 373 pages. Random House. $5.95.

Peter Matthiessen is an homme engage who is actually engaged in something more strenuous than wagging his tongue. He is a doer who indefatigably does, and a writer who skillfully writes about what he does. In intervals between the composition of three notable short novels, he has pursued a second profession of anthropology in New Guinea and South America, and has written two fine books (Under the Mountain Wall, The Cloud Forest) about his expeditions there. Now at last the scientist and the artist have collaborated to achieve a large and powerful novel that is simultaneously a tale of violent adventure and a parable in which modern man finds religious rebirth in the green womb of nature.

The Temperaments. The central fact in Matthiessen’s fiction is a tribe of Indians who live in Peru’s trans-Andean jungles as they have lived since the morning of the world. They are called the Niaruna, and their pristine condition attracts two men of intense and opposite temperament and tradition.

Martin Quarrier is a fundamentalist missionary who enters the jungle to save the Niaruna. He is a kindly but conventional Christian who truly believes that the Indians will burn in brimstone if he does not baptize them. He pays for his stupidity to the uttermost farthing. The Niaruna indignantly reject his religion, his wife goes crazy with the heat, his small son dies of blackwater fever, and as the tragedy concludes he is hacked to pieces by the only important Niaruna who calls himself a convert.

Meriwether Lewis Moon, the missionary’s counterpart, is a college-educated Cheyenne half-breed who follows the small wars around the world, selling his gun to the highest bidder. He hates the white man for what he has done to the Indian, and he enters the jungle to rejoin the living tradition of his race. As he slowly descends upon them, haloed in a parachute, the Niaruna fall on their knees and worship him as Kisu, the sky god.

Old Serpent. Accepting divinity instead of death, Moon stays with the tribe for almost a year and finds peace in the simple forest life. But in this paleolithic paradise there lives the old serpent of self-knowledge, and in the end it hurls this modern Adam out of his paradise and into the dark night of the soul. For weeks, for months, he drifts alone and probably insane down a mighty river that is sometimes the Amazon and sometimes the River of Life. Then one day he looks into a forest pool and sees a face: “A face bare with privation but the wide eyes were clear, and behind the face the clouds of heaven rolled majestically across the world.” A blaze of sunlight sparkles on the water. “He entered the sun’s sparkle and drank. Mineral and cold as a prairie river, the water bathed his heart. He felt himself open like a flower.” That night he built an enormous fire to inform the universe that he was there, to announce anew the Creation of Man.