Lament for an Inquisitor

THE DEATH OF ACHILLES by Victor Price. 308 pages. Doub/ec/ay. $4.50.

The 20th century has acquired title to the political inquisition, as it has to the internal-combustion engine, not by invention but by refinement. The modern subtlety is the obscene symbiosis in which interrogator and victim cooperate willingly in an elaborate pretense of the victim's guilt. And the basic document of this condition is the long dialogue between Rubashov and Gletkin in Koestler's Darkness at Noon.

What is horrifying about the Koestler novel is that the reader becomes convinced that in Rubashov's place he himself would become a complying victim. Anyone in the 20th century can become a victim; that needs no further proof. But a further evil is possible, Irish Writer Victor Price argues in this thoughtful first novel. What Price suggests is that anyone, bound up in the tangled complicities of corrupting power, may become an interrogator. Price's hero is Hugh Barbour, a classicist who escapes from his academic hide-hole into a job interrogating Greek prisoners for the British army in Cyprus. For three years he sets his conscience aside, "breaking his subjects" with the inquisitor's classic alternation of bullying and sympathizing. He is shot at by terrorists, but even this does not upset his routine of work, liquor, sleep and sun bathing. His sleepwalking ends when he seduces a Cypriot girl. Before his guilt can bring him to renounce his job, the girl's young brother empties a Sten gun into a cafe where Barbour is sitting. Five men die: Barbour is untouched. It is he who must question the terrorist brother. His predicament has become truly modern: that is, it has no solution.

Author Price writes just well enough to sharpen the reader's disappointment that he does not write better. The love affair is a fleshy banality, and Price's examination of the interrogator at work falls far short of Koestler's hard clarity. The best of the book shows the British army, all aclank with methodical, motorized idiocy, snark hunting after terrorists in the villages of Cyprus. Price's half-developed central idea leads disturbingly to the suspicion that if civilization does come to a halt, the last moving parts will have been not the generals or the blinkered politicians, but the interrogators--asking probing, arrogant questions long after the answers have any significance at all.

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