Tale of India

THE SEVEN ISLANDS (157 pp.]--Jon Godden--Knopf ($3).

The literary precursor of the novel was the tale, originally an oral narrative. In the hands of such latter-day practitioners as Oscar Wilde and Max Beerbohm, the tale became a highly sophisticated means of telling a story that would not be believable if told in any other tone of voice. In The Seven Islands, Novelist Jon (The House by the Sea) Godden makes the unbelievable believable by spinning with quiet skill a stately little tale about India and hanging from its frail threads the weight of an ancient way of life.

The seven islands are holy land surrounded by the sacred waters of the Ganges. Upon one of the islands lives a naked, nameless holy man, the intimate of eagles and snakes, who radiates well-being and gives out serenity "as a flower gives its scent." Trouble begins when a group of Vaishnavas start to build a religious establishment on one of the islands. After years of privation the holy man has shed the "creed of any religion but he believed as the Hindus do that God is in all things, animate and inanimate, that all things are in God." Because he knows the religious project will destroy the living creatures on the islands, he declares war on the interlopers. But in the course of three assaults, in which he enlists the help of an army of snakes and plunders a temple of its god, the sadhu only succeeds in strengthening his enemies and losing his otherworldliness. For two weeks he does penance, crouched in a cold stone cell where he can neither stand up nor lie down. There, "light and clear and unimpeded," he finds again the mystic way to bliss. When he emerges from his cell, he is his old serene self; he has learned not "to concern himself with what must be. The fate of the island and its bird inhabitants he had laid in the hand of God." Soon God's way finds a solution to the sadhu's problem that nobody could have anticipated.

Author Godden, sister of Novelist Rumer (An Episode of Sparrows) Godden, has told her tale with the simplicity of a fable, leaving her readers to probe for themselves the depths she merely suggests. Few will be persuaded by the tale's fatalism, but many may be intrigued by its mystical conception of the path to truth.

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