Pasteboard Parable

By Paul Gray

PROTEUS

by Morris West Morrow; 324 pages; $9.95

In the tiny group of consistently best-selling novelists, Morris West qualifies as the brains of the organization. That will give you, as Groucho Marx used to say, some idea of the organization. Still, West's popular fictions, like The Devil's Advocate, have regularly favored byplay over foreplay, concepts over jet-set conceits. Rather, than reading the public mind, West has specialized in suggesting what it ought to be thinking.

This time his premise is grim and all too true. Innocent people are being kidnaped or blown up by terrorists, tortured and murdered by repressive regimes of all political stripes. West's question may be old, but it is nonetheless urgent: Is it possible to combat violence without becoming violent?

No, at least not in the pasteboard parable that West contrives. John Spada. an Italian American, runs his multinational conglomerate in the style of a medieval prince, but he is also, in the best potboiler parlance, "a man living a double life." When not wheeling and dealing, he heads Proteus, an apparently vast and clandestine club that liberates political prisoners. Proteus prefers handing out carrots to achieve its ends, but will use the stick when other means fail. Spada's crusade becomes a vendetta when his daughter and her Argentine husband are arrested in Buenos Aires and brutalized by security police. He manages to rescue them both, and then, for reasons not entirely clear, is put on the hit list of any number of nasty organizations. In retaliation, Spada secures a toxic substance sufficient to hold the entire world for ransom. In short, he becomes the most terrible terrorist of them all.

If it is possible to ignore the moral issues that West himself raises and then drops, Proteus can be clear sailing. Connoisseurs of page-turners will feel right at home in a world where a woman can still be described as a "leggy redhead," where grins are "crooked," where a Jewish character says "oy vay" and a Scotsman says "aye."

Escapists will revel in the hero, whose power and wealth lead to freedom that is the stuff of fantasy, and fantasy-fiction: "He could be a welcome guest anywhere across the continent. He could host a dozen luncheons. He could summon a harem of women, fly to Haiti or Honolulu or Honduras at the flash of a credit card." West's people may converse in bromides ("Let me put it this way," one observes. "It's lonely at the top"), but they get them wrong often enough to sustain suspense: "Men get drunk in high places. Sometimes they get illusions of grandeur."

West's neatest trick, though, is reserved for the end. One of the things that Spada demands, as the price for not poisoning mankind, is permission to address the General Assembly of the United Nations. In real life, of course, he could do so and no one would notice, but West ignores this for the sake of his artifice. The resulting episode is thus one of the neatest bits of whimsical invention since A.A. Milne created the heffalump.

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