Horob's Way

IN THE TIME OF GREENBLOOM (407 pp.) --Gabriel Fielding--Morrow ($4.75).

The title of this exciting new novel sounds like an archaic phrase in celebration of spring. But Greenbloom is a man, not a season. More important, he is a state of mind. Greenbloom is awareness, sentience, ceaseless war on man's most deadly enemy, which is not cancer or heart disease, but habit--all the routines of thinking, feeling and doing that enable humans to get through life without living it.

The soul that Greenbloom saves is that of adolescent John Blaydon, who is typical of the schoolboy in the English novel during the past 100 years--sensitive, mildly precocious, ignored by adults except when he exasperates or embarrasses them. John Blaydon does both frequently, for he is incapable of committing a transgression without being caught. When he goes swimming in the nude with nubile Victoria Blount, she almost drowns, and John is discovered by an entire house party as he sits astride her thighs applying artificial respiration. At school John is similarly arraigned by fate when a homosexual classmate slips into his bed. Instead of being totally pliant or totally repelled, John's mixed reactions create a hysteric scene. But it takes a country vacation with Victoria Blount and her mother to bring into the open an evil that has been only hinted at. John Blaydon, though innocent, becomes notorious in all England. John's parents--his father is a vicar-- hope that the scandal will vanish if they ignore it. He is sent to a different school. His name is changed. But to those who know, and those who do not, he is a queer duck. To John himself, life seems as opaque and resistant as if he were living on the ocean floor.

Wrong Way Corrigan. Enter Horab Greenbloom, a character so prodigious that he nearly runs away with the book. Horab can only be described in superlatives of wealth, intelligence, vitality and childishness. He drives his Bentley at top speed, depending for guidance on his passengers ("What's that coming up on the left, Mick? Good God, you should have warned me minutes ago. It nearly hit us"). He flies his deHavilland Moth with the aplomb of Wrong Way Corrigan. Aiming for France, he makes a forced landing instead on a race track in Ireland. Even when he hears a native's brogue, Greenbloom insists that he is near Chantilly, dismisses the fellow as talking "some kind of patois . . . He must be a Basque."

Greenbloom is always on the move: mentally, from Wittgenstein to Sartre; physically, from London to Paris; metaphysically, from Jewish Orthodoxy to agnosticism. Greenbloom, thinks John, "might equally well have been chasing something with every good intention or fleeing from it with a black heart." Indefinably but truly, Greenbloom helps John to the unlocking of his heart and mind.

Pit & Shallows. This novel is all the more remarkable because Author Gabriel Fielding, 41, is not a full-time writer. Under his real name, Alan Gabriel Barnsley, he is a practicing physician in Maidstone, England, borrowed his pen name from the 18th century's great Henry Fielding (he claims him as a forebear). Like the author of Tom Jones, Gabriel Fielding has an ironic turn of phrase and a gift for flamboyant character, but he resembles even more closely the late Joyce Gary in his episodic plotting and his concern for the relationship, of man and God.

While many ministers turn to the preaching and publishing of happiness on earth, novelists are taking over the theological ground they have abandoned. More persuasively than most, Author Fielding argues that the road to salvation leads through the pit of suffering rather than through the sunlit shallows of joy.

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