The Sharks of Fate

By Melvin Maddacks

JASON AND MEDEIA

by JOHN GARDNER

354 pages. Knopf. $7.95.

Once upon a legendary time there was this young Greek hero -handsome as a god. naturally, and the son of a king -who was promised the throne if he could perform one small, one merely impossible quest: bring back from far-off Asia Minor a golden fleece guarded by a monster that never slept.

Once upon a not-so-legendary time -a time when writers have to borrow their heroes and their morals if not their plots -Jason's story is getting retold by the most unlikely of bards: a professor of Old and Middle English, living on an Illinois farm, over a thousand miles from the nearest wine-dark sea.

A feat more impossible than stealing the golden fleece? Maybe. But John Gardner, a myth lifter from way back (Grendel), pulls off his quest brilliantly -not just as a tour de force but as an act of profoundly contemporary writing. A novelist who often writes like a poet, Gardner here becomes a poet who writes like a novelist, rolling out his narration in blank verse like a very good translation of the Odyssey. He uses the story of Jason to confront his own moral dilemma, the characteristically American theme that runs through his writing, most recently in The Sunlight Dialogues: How can law and freedom be reconciled?

Gardner's Jason is a man whose struggles to gain justice for himself seem destined to do injustice to others. Betrayed of his royal inheritance, he finds himself betraying the birthrights of others to get it back: particularly Medeia, daughter of the King of Colchis, owner of the golden fleece. What a humiliation for a questing hero! Jason builds a supership, the Argo. assembles his all-star crew of Argonauts, including Herakles. When he gets to Colchis, after all the usual obstacles, he finds that only by seducing Medeia -by making her betray her father and her brother -can he gain the fleece.

Like Euripides, Gardner picks up the tale years later. Medeia has contrived to have Jason's uncle turned into mincemeat, and she and Jason, now middleaged, have been sent into exile in Corinth. He is still after a throne, however, and about to betray Medeia to marry the daughter of the King of

Corinth. Is treason, alas, "life's great norm"? This, Gardner appears to say, is Jason's real quest -to learn the hard way what, if any, are "the principles of faith between men" as they pursue self-interest.

Meanwhile, life and Gardner's tale roil on, hardly a pallid allegory. Black waves tower about Jason and his crew. Popular stock characters are recalled: Circe, the Sirens. Libations of pure wine, sweet as honey, pour from a gold cup. Old crones mutter curses in dark corners, and blind seers moan; in Greek-tragedy circles, precognition is no blessing. Loves are twice as strong as life, and so are hates. This is epic country, full of men on the scale of gods and gods "as illogical as sharks."

John Gardner pursues his story with all the agony of a writer whose supreme pleasure is to imagine human beings as free as the gods. Yet Jason's betrayal of Medeia must be followed according to the moral geometry of known Greek tragedy. Medeia kills Jason's bride with a poisoned robe woven from the golden fleece, then slaughters the children she has borne Jason.

After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Gardner's Jason at least tries. When last seen he is sailing the Argo on another quest: tracking down Medeia, not in vengeance but from an odd. obsessive loyalty. Betrayal, Gardner suggests, produces its own kind of involvement. If betrayal is inevitable, then so is a man's determination to renegotiate endlessly with what he has half killed in others and in himself. Thus does Gardner reconcile Greek fate with Christian free will -by the skin of his teeth. Applying his first-class imagination with maximum risks, he has, like his characters, worked a desperate and glorious venture. "Melvin Maddocks

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