Books: Theological Thriller

EIGHT DAYS (370 pp.)—Gabriel Fielding—Morrow ($4.50).

Dr. Chance has not been a Catholic long enough to wear his new religion with serenity. At best it is a spiritual goad; at worst it is a scourge that keeps him in torment and sometimes torments his friends. He finds himself in North Africa for a vacation, an opportunity to think about his recent conversion and about his new status of widower. Yet he is already sitting in judgment. In a bar he is telling a Belgian prostitute he has just met that “making men happy” is wrong. A Catholic too, she replies: “You are obviously a convert. They are always so scrupulous.”

Eight Days is a novel in which conscience is a disease, the state of grace a beckoning Everest. It also happens to be a brilliant thriller, the kind of suspense story on which Graham Greene once had the patent. British Author Gabriel Fielding, himself a Catholic convert, has already proved (In the Time of Greenbloom; TIME, June 10, 1957) that he is one of the most skillful novelists writing in English. He is also a successful physician who knows what few physicians and equally few novelists seem to recognize: that each man’s nature is a separate case, that human nature can itself be the hardest ailment to cure.

Chance is an English prison doctor on holiday, and he is accustomed to criminals. But in the International Zone of his North African vacation spot he becomes enveloped in evil so dense and tense that it seems part of the town’s climate. There is, first of all, Marcovicz, a crippled German Jew whose mind seethes with injustice; he is a psychopath who has killed and is ready soon to kill again. Through him Dr. Chance meets an international crowd of idlers, gangsters, sex deviates and refugees from humanity who are to make his eight-day stay a nightmare.

People instinctively turn to Dr. Chance as a kind of confessor, but when he takes on the troubles of a U.S. Catholic named Macgrady, he finds a case that would stretch the capacities of the wisest priest. Macgrady is a rich idler who has lived beyond his means. He has borrowed a fortune from the local crime syndicate, doctors in Madrid have told him that he has cancer, and he is nagged by the conviction that as a bad Catholic he has small chance of dying in a state of grace. Dr. Chance seems to him the man who might save him. Against a background of native political unrest, Chance becomes part of Macgrady’s crowd. He goes to dope parties in the native quarter, drinks only a little less than Macgrady, and has the bad luck to fall in love with his patient’s beautiful young wife Anna.

When Chance decides to lend Macgrady his passport (Macgrady’s own is held by the syndicate) for a trip to London for medical help, the doctor and Anna are held as hostages. Not since Faulkner’s Temple Drake was held captive in a Memphis brothel has a novelist contrived such powerful scenes of terror. While the key gangster gives Chance a going over, the Arabs begin to riot in the town. Buildings are bombed, the gangster’s house is attacked by the mob; and while Chance fights his love for Anna and takes his physical beating, he fights the tougher battle of a religious man trying to find the grace that will keep him spiritually sane. If Chance and Macgrady sometimes probe their souls to the edge of tiresomeness, Author Fielding always intervenes just in time with the flash and verve of a man who knows that a good story is the novelist’s own form of salvation.