Revolution seen from the inside

The Talmudic tractate Pirke Avot, one of the West’s great treasuries of practical ethics, enjoins its readers: “Love work, hate dominance over others and seek no intimacy with the ruling powers.”

Ceridwen Dovey’s taut and remarkably self-assured first novel, “Blood Kin,” reminds us that, while the sages’ admonition was formulated in an era of universal despotism, its wisdom remains dew-fresh and urgently pertinent to our own time. Dovey is a 27-year-old South African who spent her adolescence in Australia and was educated in the United States -- first Harvard and, now, New York University, where she’s a doctoral candidate in social anthropology. Her parents were anti-apartheid intellectuals -- her father a distinguished university professor, her mother, Teresa, a critic and early champion of the future Nobel laureate, J.M. Coetzee.

Coetzee, in fact, contributes a jacket blurb to this book, which he aptly describes as “a fable of the arrogance of power, beneath whose dreamlike surface swirl currents of complex sensuality.”

Dovey sets her allegory in an unnamed but somehow recognizable space. A country’s despotic president has been overthrown, and the rebels have imprisoned him and his wife in their summer palace.

They also have arrested three of the deposed ruler’s closest lackeys: his chef, his barber and his personal portrait painter. Each, in turn, provides first-person accounts of their service (collaboration?) with the fallen tyrant, then -- as their accounts alternate one with the other -- descriptions of their budding relationship with the rebel leader, who simply is called “the Commander.”

The author gives each of these compromised servants an aphoristic summation of their situation. The painter, weak and frightened, is only too aware that he achieved his position because of his wealthy father-in-law’s connection to the president. His whine is exculpatory: “If I am exempt from one thing as an artist, surely it is knowing what my Government is doing?”

The chef is a much tougher character, a manipulative aging womanizer with every intention of prospering in the new regime. “We all know power and desire couple effortlessly,” he muses.

The barber is himself a kind of failed conspirator who had come to the capital with the expressed purpose of getting close to the president, who had ordered the torture and execution of his brother, a failed revolutionary. His goal is assassination, but morning after morning, he puts his razor to the tyrant’s throat and fails to act. “I am a coward,” he admits, “and I wanted to live more than I desired vengeance.”

As the story proceeds, Dovey braids these three perspectives together, then strengthens the narrative chord by introducing three first-person female voices -- the artist’s pregnant wife, the Commander’s wife (who also was the fiancee of the barber’s dead brother) and the chef’s sado-masochistic daughter. Part of what makes this novel so formally impressive is the way in which the author holds each of these personalities in narrative tension while moving adroitly between them.

There’s a knowing sensuality to the novel’s sparely lyric passages. Here the chef, who enjoys a physical relish when the Commander cleans his paella pan with a finger, broods on the loss of his good looks: “It’s hard to think of myself as an old man. My daughter said that to me on the day before I was brought in here. ‘You’re an old man,’ she said. ‘You will die soon. I don’t know if I will miss you.’ People don’t realize what it’s like to age when you’re beautiful, to feel like you reached your peak when you turned 40 and every day since that day you’ve become just a small bit uglier. A less attractive man has nothing to lose when he ages. As an older man, I am still handsome, but there is an invisible line that I’ve crossed: my body’s done a dirty deal with gravity and my hair has given up the ghost once and for all.”

Here the barber describes shampooing his master’s hair in preparation for a trim: “I guide his head beneath the tap so that the water just catches his hairline and barely wets his skin. The hair strands darken and clot with the water; he will feel the slight weight of them pulling away from his head, uncreasing his forehead, and the warmth will spread like a tide across his skull to the back of his brain.”

If there is a flaw in this fine first novel, it probably comes from the same thing that makes it doubly impressive: Dovey’s youth. While her characters think individually, they speak in one, elegantly controlled authorial voice. Six distinctive voices is a lot to ask of a writer under 30, and the book’s lack of them makes “Blood Kin” a slightly richer intellectual experience than it is an emotional one.

It is, however, formidable on its own terms. Late 20th century English-language literature is rich in works of political implication that capture what might be called the aesthetics of betrayal. John Banville’s masterful gloss on the life of the British traitor Anthony Blunt, “The Untouchable,” is one such novel that comes to mind.

Dovey has extended this genre in an important way by exploring the eros of complicity. Every tyrant’s accomplice partakes of it, as every act of collaboration is simultaneously one of seduction and submission.

As “Blood Kin” builds to both a shattering revelation and a surprising -- though hardly improbable -- conclusion, a kind of implicit judgment that feels historically correct arises: Just as often as the revolution devours its own children, its progeny devour it.

The reactionary 19th century pontiff Gregory XVI, a rather formidable clerical despot, forbade the installation of street lamps in the Papal States because he believed his subjects would gather under them and conspire against him. One of the things that makes Dovey’s impressive novel so ruthlessly unsentimental is her implicit insistence that conscience is the illumination that every tyrant must fear -- and her explicit demonstration of just how casually that light is everywhere extinguished.

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timothy.rutten@latimes.com