A Literary Pastiche : INFANTA, <i> By Bodo Kirchhoff, Translated from the German by John Brownjohn (Viking: $24; 424 pp.)</i>

Joseph Conrad’s Mr. Kurtz in “Heart of Darkness” is a voice expressing Conrad’s disgust for the “flabby, pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly” he finds at the core of humankind. Kurtz, who harvests ivory for Western colonialists in the Congo, has gone mad; his boundless appetites have overwhelmed him. He dies crying, “The horror! The horror!” This true statement--about the rapacity of the insistent self, about dread--is uttered by a false character. Kurtz is unrealized; in Conrad’s fiction he is a force, an attitude, a mood, but never a man in whose existence we believe.

In Bobo Kirchhoff’s “Infanta,” a compelling and mysterious man--he is said by the author and by gossiping characters to be compelling--suddenly appears in the contemporary Philippines, in the poverty-struck village of Infanta, on the eve of an election, when repression and revolution are in the air. He is beautiful to look at, and very unexpressive. Taken in by a group of Jesuit missionaries whose maidservant is the beautiful Mayla, he becomes the center of everyone’s focus--from the fathers, who cannot stop talking and writing about him, to Mayla, who becomes his lover, to the wily local police.

Kirchhoff’s setting is reminiscent not only of Conrad but also of Greeneland, the country ripe for moral change into which Graham Greene enjoyed setting his lone travelers; it is a psychic place, a hell, as well as a landscape: “They were now steadily descending into an ash-grey valley denuded of vegetation by fire. Flames flickered here and there on the surrounding slopes, laborers with rags over their mouths and noses sat beside smouldering tree stumps, grinding their machetes in the three o’clock sun.”

Into this valley comes Kurt Lukas, a male model, mistakenly called “Kurt” or “Mr. Kurtz or Kurt”; at one point, one of the fathers says, “You might as well ask him if he met Conrad.” That Kirchhoff wants to evoke Kurtz and “Heart of Darkness” is undeniable. Kurt Lukas seems to be suffering a literary anomie. He says little, evades his own memories, expresses few emotions except confusion. He is a European literary pastiche, a character out of Kafka and Camus, a man either pursuing or escaping his soul, perhaps, but surely a man whose actions seem to be serving literary intellection and not a self the existence of whom can be verified by the reader.

Mayla, who gives herself to Kurt, suddenly takes Father Wilhelm Gussman, a lapsed priest who has always loved her, to bed. He is ugly and old, she is breathtakingly beautiful. Her motive is said by Kirchhoff to be “a line between past and future, a nameless drawing of breath beyond time or law, neither intoxicating nor sobering, simply necessary.” That is either brilliant writing or empty language, and the reader must decide. I cannot speak for its brilliance.

A mysterious, witch-like Squalid Woman periodically frightens Kurt in the jungle. So does Homobono Narciso, the chief of police. And so does Dona Elvira, local singer and prostitute. Meanwhile, Kurt’s picture in a Newsweek ad circulates on the island, the revolution brews, and the Jesuit fathers write their impressions and chronicles of Kurt, who takes on characteristics more from their conclusions than from his inner being--which the reader searches for in vain.

Kurt becomes involved, again, with Elisabeth Ruggeri, a famous journalist who is in the Philippines to cover the “Gallant Widow,” presumably Corazon Aquino. That affair is suspended, Kurt flies to and from Mayla, assassinations occur and, throughout, the fathers write about Kurt and about writing--”What constituted a story? How should it be told? Who was to do the talking? There were so many problems”--so that the reader has no choice but to see that the novel is not about character or politics, but about (perhaps) the formulation of a way of telling ourselves our story. There is no factual accuracy, there is no accounting for the vagaries of the soul; there is a hellish landscape, a world of false values and brutality and illusion.

A novice among the Jesuits, Augustin, an innocent, is the lamb among wolves in this novel. Almost unnoticed at first, he is the survivor of the novel’s Apocalypse. He reminds me a little of the innocent in Melville’s “The Confidence Man,” a novel about the disguises of Satan and hell-on-earth that I think may have influenced “Infanta.” When Dona Elvira’s pleasure palace burns and explodes, she says, “This is the end.” When Satan, in his last disguise, leaves the scene in Melville’s novel, he says, “Let me extinguish this lamp,” this world. Each statement is about the triumph of evil. Augustin, at the end of Kirchhoff’s novel, is given a chance for survival in a dark world and may thus take us one step further toward hope than Melville and Conrad.

But it is a hope of the mind and not the heart, as this novel is an exploration of ideas about , not characters who . “Infanta,” for all its musical pulsations, the idiosyncrasies of its quirky Jesuit fathers, and the sexuality attributed to Mayla and Dona Elvira, is a novel about other novels, finally, a meditation on other meditations in literature. The reader must admire Kirchhoff’s inventiveness and energy--the novel apparently took him five years to write--but “Infanta” may finally be one of those places one is pleased to have visited and to have fled.