BOOK REVIEW : Comic Satire Becomes a Political Tragedy

Clive Sinclair has written a lobster-like caper with a message.

Lobster-like, because you have to crack the shell to get at it, and you don’t get all the little bits. But you have serious fun doing it, and it’s never entirely clear whether the slight queasiness that follows is the hangover result of sumptuousness, or a faint poison in the beast itself.

“Cosmetic Effects” begins as comic satire, but almost immediately there is a whiff of something dangerous. Jonah Isaacson, the protagonist, lectures on film at St. Albans, a new British university. His wife Sophie runs a travel business. Gutkes, his colleague and crony, is a lecherous German who sleeps with radical students Petra and Polly. Jonah yearns widely, but is faithful until he meets Stella, an unimaginably beautiful beautician, who seduces him.

Elements, in other words, for an agreeably familiar spoof of the trends and snobberies of present-day campus life, marriage, adultery and the politically and intellectually fashionable. Except that right at the beginning, blithely relating his early interest in movies, Jonah notes the propensity of early nitrate film to detonate spontaneously. He goes on to speak of his heart condition. He, too, is a bomb, he tells us, and liable to be detonated at any moment by “the great Abu Nidal in the sky.”

That signals something. So does the fact that he and Sophie are Jewish, and that her uncle is a shady real estate developer who endowed the university and who is now living in Israel after leaving England with suspicious haste.

So do Sophie’s close travel ties to the Middle East; the touches of anti-Semitism under Prof. Gutkes’ bon vivant jollity and his odd interest in knowing Jonah’s schedule of meetings with Stella. And so, finally, does the fact that Stella has worked briefly in an Arab country--Sinclair calls it Babylon--and has fantasies about its king. And that she associates with Dr. Habash, a Palestinian emigre who is a plastic surgeon at the university hospital.

Jonah’s night of passion with Stella is souped up by an aphrodisiac she has him take. It knocks him out. He is only aware, as in a dream, of Habash slipping in, mumbling something about plastic, breaking his arm with a small hammer, and plastering it up in a cast. Stella’s explanation, when he is fully awake, was that he had broken his arm falling out of bed and gone to hospital.

Plastered up, and with a small clock-pen that Stella gives him with instructions to be sure to write her, Jonah takes off with Sophie for a trip to Israel. And without losing its elements of comedy--sometimes approaching the slapstick--the book turns into a mixture of thriller and black political parable.

Jonah, now literally a human bomb, is detonated, though not in midair, as planned. It happens, instead, in the course of a reception in honor of a film to be financed by Sophie’s uncle and the Israeli government, with an old-time director of Westerns--a Howard Hawks type--to make it.

The Industry Minister--a malevolent former general who is clearly meant to be Ariel Sharon--is killed; Jonah survives with the loss of his arm and his memory. He will return to England with Sophie, he will be given an artificial arm by Dr. Habash--”Haven’t we met somewhere?” Habash blandly inquires--and the intricate plot will come round again, with all the players repeating their roles and with a return to Israel and a new mortal outrage.

Jonah’s amnesia and his troubled dreams form a bridge from the jocosely real to the grimly allegorical. The cosmetics of the title keep reappearing: in Stella’s profession, in the papering-over of a crack that develops in Jonah’s home, and above all in the disguise offered by his prosthesis. We carry on our lives and our politics in a cosmetic evasion of their real horror, Sinclair suggests.

There is corruption everywhere--in the Israelis represented by Sophie’s uncle and the Industry Minister and, on the other side, by the mysterious Professor Gutkes. Stella is a crass and painted instrument of terror; Habash an idealistic one. He compares Jonah’s lost arm, with its phantom aching, to Palestine, which has been eradicated from the map but continues to hurt.

Jonah’s phantom arm does, in fact, become a character. It intervenes from time to time; sometimes defending Jonah, sometimes writing prophetic denunciations on the walls, sometimes waging war on its plastic successor, sometimes as a provocateur. It appears among a group of Arab children and throws the first stone at an Israeli patrol, which opens fire and kills seven of the children.

Sinclair’s parable is very black and very bleak. Occasionally, there is a sense that he is inflicting horror even more than denouncing it. On the whole, though, it stands up with uncommon strength. In their comic phases, his characters sometimes get out of hand, or simply mark time. But the author manages remarkably well in the forbidding task of turning them, imperceptibly and with no sense of strain, into symbolic actors in one of the world’s great tragedies.

COSMETIC EFFECTS by Clive Sinclair Viking $18.95, 247 pages

Next: Elaine Kendall reviews Edna O’Brien, “Lantern Slides” (Farrar Straus & Giroux) .