A Rousing Tale for a Long March

By John Skow

A SOLDIER OF THE GREAT WAR

by Mark Helprin; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; 792 pages; $24.95

There has never been any question about Mark Helprin's talent, and since his first books of fiction, A Dove of the East and Refiner's Fire, he has seemed on the point of accomplishing marvels. He has also seemed -- notably in Winter's Tale, an overblown fantasy starring an annoying magical horse -- to be a posturer incapable of modulating eloquence or intensity, a too appreciative taster of his own words, a gifted windbag.

Helprin's big, rumbustious new novel is about four-fifths of a marvel. Helprin has simplified his language, though he still works up a good head of rhetorical steam, and he has moderated his enthusiasm for phantasmagoric set pieces. He has also picked themes -- war and loss, youth and age -- that suit a large, elaborate style. His hero is a 74-year-old Italian, Alessandro Giuliani, during World War I a soldier who fought the Austrians and, in 1964, the novel's present time, a professor of aesthetics. Alessandro meets Nicolo, a 17-year-old illiterate factory apprentice, when they both miss a weekend bus from Rome to the hill towns. On a whim, they decide to walk the 70 km or so to their destinations. On the way, Alessandro tells his story.

As this traditional literary format takes shape -- pilgrims, a long walk, a tale to while away the distance -- the elderly Alessandro rattles on owlishly. "Tell me," he says, "what kind of feet do you have?" Nicolo is confused. "I have human feet, Signore." Alessandro lectures: "Of course, but two kinds of feet exist . . . Feet of despair are too tender, and can't fight back . . . On the other hand, if I may, are the feet of invincibility."

Just as the reader, with more than 700 pages still to march, begins to worry about blisters, the youthful Alessandro takes over the narrative. Here, for a very large chunk of the novel's center, Helprin writes with riotous energy and $ sustained brilliance about boyhood, youth and war. There is a strange, dreamlike adventure in the Alps, when Alessandro at age nine or 10 is caught up in a mountain rescue, then in a preadolescent erotic tangle with an Austrian princess. Later there is a splendid silliness in which he taunts a couple of mounted carabinieri while riding his horse, and outraces them in a mad gallop across half of Rome. He joins the navy and finds himself shooting at a much larger Austrian force across the barrier of a river that is, alas, drying up. Friends die. He is swept up in a mutinous retreat, caught, imprisoned, condemned, then released on the whim of a mad dwarf in the war ministry, whose function is to make sure that military orders are garbled and meaningless. Then he is thrown back into the line, wounded, and swept up again, this time in a love affair with a nurse.

Alessandro is no allegorical puppet, like Candide; his character darkens and hardens as the fighting grinds on. The author's view of war is grim enough to be quite modern. But his evocation of love is thoroughly romantic, and so, in the balanced flourishes of the ending chapters, is his novel. Fair enough; as usual, Helprin lights his own way, in his own singular direction.