The Misadventures of One Lucas Iberria

Like the poet at the start of the Divine Comedy, Lucas Iberria is in a state of existential funk: stuck halfway through his life and wandering lost in a dark wood. He too has his Beatrice to inspire and lead him on--in this case, a mysterious beauty named Maria. (Lucas, who majored in Latin and Greek and had been working in a New York bookstore, identifies her with Diana, goddess of the hunt and the moon.)

What Lucas does not have is Dante. He does have Hans Koning, a former journalist and author of a number of novels, the best known of which was “A Walk With Love and Death.”

Koning, who used to write as Hans Konigsberger, has not published for a while. “Pursuit of a Woman on the Hinge of History” is a reemergence but hardly a resurrection. It attempts a mythic flight with most of its wing feathers molted, as if Dante had written his vision with a limping command of Italian prosody.

“Pursuit” is a parable about the tiny forces of good--a secret and seemingly outgunned elite--battling the corrupt titans of international power and finance. The chief titan is Vinograd, an octopus-like multi-billionaire with lavish mansions in all the principal capitals, each housing a tentacle. Not content with buying banks, businesses and governments, he has vacuumed up the world’s art as well, using his checkbook to pillage the museums and storing the hoard in a cavern in the Colorado Rockies.

Against him stands Maria / Diana, symbolizing for Koning the magical, moonlit force of womanhood--more psychologist Carol Gilligan than Gloria Steinem--that will take up, fresh, the worn-out governance wielded by five millenniums of men. Her weapons are trickery, wit and a network of oddly assorted supporters, oddest of which is the Basque guerrilla group, ETA.

Into this duel for the world’s soul incautiously stumbles Lucas. He has taken time off from his bookstore job and from Claire, his sort-of girlfriend, to go brood in a parador in northern Spain. For him, the world consists of places to leave--”I am an American dissident,” he proclaims--with no place to arrive. All this will change one night at dinner: Dining nearby, with a bearded man sporting a vulgar gold chain, is Maria.

“If the one Just Man may restore our hope for the world, then how much more may one woman do so, a woman beautiful not by the standards of men, even of poets, but by those of rivers, rain, nature?”

The words are a fair sample of Koning’s prose--not an instrument of salvation but a battle-ax to knock salvation silly. They launch Lucas on his mission and quest. Maria and her companion depart; he is Vinograd and their quiet dinner will turn out to be another round in their world-shaking duel. A stunned Lucas remains.

A fellow guest shows him a card Vinograd has given her, and he falls into bed with her, lovelessly. What is a woman to him when he has glimpsed Woman? He is off to Frankfurt to seek Vinograd and try to find Maria. Through the train windows, where many would see scenery, he sees history. Germany “is seeded with severed limbs, ashes of heretics, bloodless remnants of flayed rebels, rotting leather enclosing the bones it failed to shield, skulls choked off with piano wire.”

Not all of Koning’s prose is bombast. His attitude toward Lucas has a touch of irony at times, letting squirts of fresh air into the high quest. Seeking proper clothes to confront Vinograd, Lucas goes into a cheap clothing store where all the suits have a greenish tinge. Sensibly, he chooses a green suit. “With green, I decided, greenishness didn’t matter.”

Such moments are welcome but rare in the adventures that ensue. Lucas worms his way into a press dinner given by Vinograd. Filching a newspaper clipping from the host’s bedroom, he confronts the financier with Maria’s picture. From here on, he is persecuted by the police of several countries, is jailed, makes his escape and all the while continues to seek her out.

Soon the Basques recruit him. Maria has persuaded Vinograd to funnel a huge sum of money through her to advance their independence movement. It will give him a new country where, Bahamas-like, he can wheel and deal. In a moon-goddess double-cross, she will use the money against him.

Meanwhile, Lucas is whirled through a series of extravagant exploits: an armed action to symbolically close the French-Basque border, flight to the U.S. A bribed court convicts him for Vingorad’s murder, which in fact does not take place.

Maria finally appears to him--up to then she has only been glimpses--and, by means of bribes, delivers him from jail and into new stages of the world struggle.

Mercifully, the book ends here. Despite occasional, welcome moments of grounding, Koning’s prose is largely out of control. So is the plot. “Pursuit” is a contrived and inflated epic, an adolescent game of “Dungeons and Dragons.”