The Vicar Falls

FEAR NO EVIL (372 pp.)--Hugh Massingham--Random House ($3).

The Rev. Mr. Dewson wore his righteousness like a medal. Furthermore, he bristled with an athletic vigor that expressed itself in cold baths, ten-mile walks and an awesome lack of self-doubt. Since he had not the slightest interest in religious contemplation, he could devote himself to being an intellectual busybody ("Politics, economics, psychology, Freud, Adler, even Marx--it is our bounden duty to keep up to date"). His estranged son Ronald called him "God's sergeant major."

As any reader will know at once, the Rev. Mr. Dewson was riding for a fall. Dewson began to get his when a blackmailer hinted that son Ronald was turning into a criminal in London, threatened to inform the police unless he was paid off. The vicar saw his whole life toppling before his eyes; to save his son and his own career he set off for the city. His descent into the depths of London and sin forms the core of Fear No Evil, a well-built novel hedged with thick moral brambles.

"Ernie-Pernie." On a fog-smeared night, Dewson met May, the streetwalker whom he suspected of being his son's mistress. It happened in a London pub (where Dewson had ordered a beer because lemonade would be too conspicuous), and the pickup was easy. When May learned why he had been looking for her, she led him on with promises to help him find Ronald. Pretty soon she was calling him "Ernie-Pernie."

Dewson's repeated Wednesday trips to London excited gossip in his parish, which was only partly hushed by his announcement that he was working with a boys' club in the slums. Though he told himself he was trying to help his son, his real interest soon became May. She seemed so harmless and innocent, a "slip of a girl with a high, child's voice," not at all like the stock Jezebel he had imagined. He thought of her with pride, almost as if she were his own creation, and found even her silliness and vulgarity proof of her essential innocence.

May worked him for all he was worth. She taught him to drink, pretended to be entranced by his maturity ("Young men are so soppy"). When she put her fresh young face against his worn, spiky skin, he was hers to twist as she wished. First she bilked him for money that she said was for Ronald; then made him set her up in a comfortable suburban house. It wasn't long before he had borrowed the life savings of his maiden aunts and pawned the household silver.

Rocky Road. The end was inevitable. His son, he learned, had left England months ago and May had been victimizing him. Dewson had a nervous collapse, but with the knowledge that he was ruined came a new sense of humility and of oneness with his fellow sinners. As he said of himself while vainly begging his parish enemy, the bank manager, not to expose him: "When he talks of sin it is of himself that he is talking, of his loneliness, his shame, his horror, his fear, his loathing."

Vicar Dewson's rocky road to salvation is an old story, but in Fear No Evil, British Author Massingham has fleshed it with compassion and vivid reality. The reader rejoices at Dewson's tumble from smugness; he lays the book down with hope for the fellow's future.

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