Fast Shuffle

TORQUEMADA by Howard Fast 192 pages. Doubleday. $3 95.

In Torquemada, Howard Fast has reached back 500 years to compose a bitter fictional parable about one of the most detested figures in the history of man or of man's religion--the Dominican Friar Thomas de Torquemada, Prior of Segovia and Grand Inquisitor of Spain. Or so it seems. A parable illuminates a complexity with a single truth. Fast's is a terrible, simple tale which raises more complex questions than it provides simple answers for.

Friar Thomas and his boyhood friend Don Alvero de Rafel ride from Segovia to Seville at the summons of Ferdinand and Isabella. Each man is consulted about Columbus' projected expedition west to the Indies. Don Alvero, a knight who has fought the Moors, assures the Queen that the earth is indeed round like a ball. The King, however, turns down Columbus on the grounds that 1) the earth is flat, and 2) Columbus is a Jew. Actually, Columbus was not Jewish, but for some odd reason Fast does not bother to enlighten the King or the reader.

Friend Betrayed. The relations between Thomas and Alvero are poisoned, for the King appoints Thomas the Grand Inquisitor of all Spain. Absolute power corrupts him absolutely. He has caused heretics to be burned before; now he accepts the King's commission as a mandate for an anti-Semitic holocaust. Thomas' hatred is not for Jews (who, he thinks, are damned anyway) but for the marrano, the converted Jew who might secretly practice Jewish rites. Fatally, Don Alvero is such a one, or could be mistaken for one by malice and fanaticism. And so, Torquemada puts his friend to the torture. Alvero's own wife repudiates him as a Jew, and while he is recovering from torture, his daughter is immolated in a fire that burns the ancient synagogue of Segovia. Thomas gives Alvero his freedom in exchange for the girl's sacrifice.

This is the fable, and it is told in a peculiarly simplistic fashion--costume-drama style minus costume--designed to give somnambulistic inevitability to the dreadful action. The hypnotic effect may not take in some readers who will be irritated by the tones of an adult careful not to use big words to a low-IQ child. Moreover, Fast's publishers call Torquemada a tour de force; it could also be a sleight of hand. How it is read probably depends on how much the reader knows of history, not excluding the history of Howard Fast.

Commissar. In seeking an ogre in history, Historical Novelist Fast (Citizen Tom Paine) need have looked no further than the man in whose honor he was given the Stalin Peace Prize in 1953. But perhaps a contemporary fable would be too painful for Fast. He was an unswervingly militant card-carrying Communist and something of a culture commissar for Communism. Himself a Jew, he became anti-Stalin and quit the Party only when he discovered that Stalin was anti-Jew. This underlies the special weakness of Fast's tale. In fashioning Torquemada as a demented racist and centering his story on the plight of the Jew, Fast ignores history. The Inquisition was concerned with heresy not heredity; it was Catholic Spain's method of safeguarding theological doctrine. Less than one-fourth of Torquemada's 8,800 victims at the stake, in fact, were impenitent Jews.

The Inquisition was a page of terrible madness in history, but it was not the same as the racial and class madness that drowned Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia in the blood of victims who outnumbered Torquemada's by more than 1,000 to one. Another ex-Communist did rather better. Using the heavier stones of current history, Arthur Koestler built Darkness at Noon into something more than an adult horror comic; he made his book a classic defense against the ogres of absolutism who think that their political faith gives them power over the minds and bodies of other men. Koestler brought a better mind to the subject; he began by renouncing the inquisitor within himself. Fast's book is no more than a tua culpa. In the person of Alvero, he seems to be trying to recover in the 15th century the innocence he lost in the 20th.

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