The Lovers. - book reviews

National Catholic Reporter, May 28, 1993 by Peter Hebblethwaite

Australian novelist Morris West, 76, says this will be his last novel. The element of publisher's come-hither hype is enhanced by the suggestion that this farewell to literature is as much autobiography as invention. West has reached an age when "the curtains between fact, fiction and the final mystery are wearing thin."

This is fiction, he explains, "but a fiction transmuted from many realities: fragments of personal experience, portraits of men and women met along the pilgrim way" and the Mediterranean landscapes and seascapes he came to know from the 1950s.

But it is one thing to say all this and another to identify Bryan de Courcy Cavanagh, whose love for the beautiful Princess Giulia Farnese shapes the narrative, with the young Morris West. "He is not he: she is not she," he teases, "it's a trick done with mirrors."

Even distorting mirrors reflect some sort of truth. But we'll never know how much. Cavanagh, the novel's hero, is Australian. But you must not think of him as some colonial hick. He learned Italian down under from an old man who was a friend of playwright Luigi Pirandello. Until the last page he is the only person with enough Greek to understand the first mate's lecherous diary.

Yet Princess Giulia is right in her advice. In Britain, she says, he would remain an outlander, "the wild colonial boy." In the United States he would become as rich as Declan Aloysius Molloy, whom she must marry to save the family, but he would hate himself for it.

So the talented Australian has two choices: go back home and be king in his cabbage patch or become an internationalist. Cavanagh chooses the second path, becoming an international lawyer.

It is ostensibly as a lawyer that he is summoned by Giulia in 1992, 40 years after their steamy shipboard romance. This releases the buried memories of 1952 when the events of the novel unfold in a Europe still reeling from the war and where the Vatican and the CIA conspire to stop the communist advance.

There is perfect unity of place: Almost everything happens on board the yacht Salamandra d'Oro or is connected with it. Molloy hires Cavanagh as a crew member and eventually acting captain as he cruises the Mediterranean with his bride-to-be, Princess Giulia, her father, her aunt, Galeazzi, head of the "Vatican Bank" and a crew of varied sexual proclivities.

But this is not just a pleasure cruise. Molloy and Galeazzi are reconnoitering the coastline looking for sites for marinas and other developments. They get mixed up in CIA business when they take aboard Tolvier, a Frenchman who tortured on behalf of the Gestapo in Lyons.

Touvier was -- is -- his name in real life. He is still around. He was not protected by the Cardinal Archbishop of Lyons, as West says, but by Monsignor Charles Duquaire, who came on the scene later than 1952.

This doesn't matter in a novel. Yet the mixture of the real and the imaginary is sometimes disconcerting. Luigi Visconti, the film director, and Tennessee Williams pop aboard for lunch, though they are not made to do much.

Morris West the prophet, lashing the corruptions of the church, is not obsessively present here, except in one crucial and perhaps decisive way: Princess Giulia goes into a loveless marriage with Molloy instead of eloping with her Australian lover.

But her marriage has been fixed as a business proposition. It will bring American money into the family and the Christian Democratic coffers in Italy. It is blessed by Papa Pacelli and Cardinal Francis J. Spellman, the "American pope." Anyway Molloy would have Cavanagh murdered if he ran off with Giulia. He has already killed in a gaming duel in Cuba.

But was Princess Giulia right to accept all this? Was it even a valid marriage? It is the sort of question West has no doubt discussed with Swiss Archbishop Bruno Heim, retired nuncio to Britain.

Heim, the world's leading expert on ecclesiastical heraldry, is thanked for designing a coat of arms for the Farnese family -- in fact they have been extinct since 1731. He knows many secrets, too, says West, but unlike the author he is bound by the seal of the confessional.

Indeed the book has rather a confessional feel. And maybe the moral conundrum about whether Giulia should or should not have gone into a loveless marriage is answered by the revelation that her only son, whom everyone supposed was fathered by Malloy, was in fact the product of their passionate couplings aboard the "Golden Salamander."

So love conquers all, in the end, God writes straight on crooked lines, and the salamander survives the flames of passion. There's a Catholic twist at the end which can be unveiled without spoiling the story. Their love child, Alessandro Farnese, is now a priest. He works in the Secretariat of State, has just been made archbishop of a titular see and is about to be sent as nuncio to one of the new republics emerging from the former Soviet Union. He provides a blessing, absolution and perhaps expiation.

Maybe not another novel, but a postscript about the life of Archbishop Alessandro Farnese, might tempt West back for one more Sinatralike appearance. Meantime, this farewell will do very nicely. Morris West signs out in top form.