Books: History Seen Small

THE COIN OF CARTHAGE by Bryher. 240 pages. Harcourt, Brace & World. $4.50.

Historical novelists who use lowly characters to eyewitness the past customarily keep them close to the great captains—as, say, a cabin boy on the Santa Maria or a drummer dragged along in the wake of Napoleon’s march to Moscow. But the wispy, aging English heiress who calls herself Bryher and now lives permanently in Switzerland writes historical fiction in her own strange way. Her latest book covers some 40 years of the Punic wars. Characteristically, her two major characters never take part in, or talk about, any of the major battles. They are not attached to either army. For that matter, they are not even Roman or Carthaginian, but a pair of grubby Greek traders.

No Subtitles. Bryher’s seemingly patchy method is likely to prove a relief to readers tired of overstuffed historical pageantry. But her assumption that anyone reading the book will know in large outline at least who won the Punic Wars and how is often disconcerting. As Trader Zonas leaves from his home in a seaport town and trudges into the hills with the hope of selling leather bridles to the Carthaginians, his small adventures at first seem fragmentary and meaningless—like a provocative foreign film seen without subtitles.

What Bryher eventually brings into view, however, is the enduring landscape along the fringes of a wasting war of occupation. Hannibal’s army lives off the Italian countryside for decades at a stretch, until the danger from the war is as familiar a part of peasant life as drought or plague. The Italian villagers are loyal to Rome when the legions can defend them, comfortably acquiescent when the Carthaginians ride into town and offer better prices. To the fearful peasantry, Hannibal’s few armored elephants loom dreadfully, like the roaming German Tiger Tanks of World War II.

Silver Shekel. Zonas does meet Hannibal, during a Carthaginian parade through a hill town. Rushing out to save his strayed donkey from being trampled by an elephant, he is rewarded with a silver shekel from the African general instead of the swift death he expected. But the coin does not lead him to great adventure. Zonas lives too prudently close to the ground for that.

If Zonas is a man most likely to survive, his friend Dasius is an idealist most unlikely to do so. The restless son of a Roman freedman and a Greek slave, he yearns for the dark freedom of Carthage’s Africa, finds it, and loses everything. In time of war, Bryher suggests, it is advisable to make only the smallest demands upon life.

Bryher’s small, shapely book, like the handful of minor historical classics in which she has previously sought to trap various troubled and far-off times (Roman Wall, Beowulf), is nobody’s guidebook to the important events of a historic day or decade. But it offers the details and textures of a particular age so pervasively known and felt by the author that it does not have to be clumsily insisted upon as scholarship. The figures who move in Bryher’s historic landscape are neither makers nor victims of history. They are men, seen small, but with a strong sense of the mystery that even the least significant human life enfolds.