A Man of Principle

FACE OF A HERO (221 pp.)--Pierre Boulle--Vanguard ($3.50).

In the intellectual landscape created by French Novelist Boulle, the most interesting sight is a special stream of Gallic irony. His heroes drown in it before the reader's eyes, but even as they go down it is obvious that they all know how to swim. In The Bridge Over the River Kwai it was a British colonel whose fight for honor gave aid and comfort to the Japanese. In Not the Glory, it was a German spy whose best efforts aided the British. In his new novel, laid in a sleepy Provencal town among ordinary people, it is a man of law twisted by circumstance to pervert his own notion of justice.

Jean Berthier is the public prosecutor of the town of Bergerane. One hot Sun day he is lying on the bank of the Rhone River, his young fiancee asleep in his arms. Brilliantly successful at 30, he is a stiff and formal fellow who would feel embarrassed just to be caught in public with his jacket off. A young girl, evidently injured in a fall from her bike, comes limping down to the river's edge. When the girl stumbles and falls into a whirl pool, all of Jean Berthier's character flaws jump into action at once. He is afraid of waking up his fiancee; she might become frightened. He is afraid to jump into the river; the whirlpool might be dangerous.

He hesitates, does nothing. When his fiancee awakes, he says that he too has been asleep, and they leave.

But the young girl is found drowned.

Young Vauban, a rich no-good, is picked up as a suspect. The trouble is that the innocent Vauban looks very guilty indeed -- he had taken the girl out, they had quarreled, he had threatened her. But the whole countryside is sure that Vauban is too rich and influential to be prosecuted. This stings Prosecutor Berthier, and gradually he persuades himself that "justice" must be done. As the knowledge spreads that Berthier means to do his duty, he becomes a public hero. His girl's adoration lives in her eyes, and he knows the heady pride of a man who is honored for sticking to principle. Full of righteousness, he sets out in court to convict a man he knows to be innocent.

Not until the very end does Face of a Hero diminish in suspense. And in spite of more careless writing than Author Boulle is usually guilty of, his grip on the emotions is as firm as ever--because the book is so uncomfortably a reminder of that streak of injustice that lives in every man. Until the last page Boulle keeps alive the hope that the streak will subside and that conscience will triumph. As a realist--and a Frenchman--can he let anything like that happen?

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