Evan S. Connell

Like everything Connell has done, these books are interesting, at times fascinating, filled with apocrypha and a lyric imagination, but to my mind, they're his weakest. They seem unfocused, too angry, gratuitous in a way his other works do not. One can't help thinking: Christ, lighten up a little. I mean, were Christians all bad? Was there not a spark of nobility anywhere, in anyone, in Vietnam? They seem more like pamphlets at times than poems, piling up one atrocity after another, without giving us the sharp, focused view -- the sadness, frankly, some evidence that the consciousness at work has been effected -- of the tragedies before us, which is one of the great strengths of the Bridge books, "Diary" and "Son of the Morning Star."

In 1991 came "The Alchemyst's Journal." I'm not even sure what to call it. A collection of stories in the form of seven philosophical meditations by an alchemist? A novel? It's so dense, so packed with Latinisms, period English, the medieval mind-set and voices with no sense of personality, not to mention absolutely no concrete circumstances to pin down some sort of narrative, any sort of narrative, that I couldn't get through it again. After reading this I had concluded, alas, that Connell had to be doing some kind of private experiment to see how few readers a book might get, or to see if he could guarantee never receiving another advance from a publisher.

The good news is that with "Deus Lo Volt!," Connell's new novel of the Christian Crusades, he seems to have found a way to take all that is great from his early work, even the obscure work, and turn it into a devastating novel. ("The Alchemyst's Journal" now reads like an experimental warm-up to this much more successful effort.) The book is also in many ways a perfect summation of his career, taking all the early concerns and aesthetic shape-shifting and funneling them into what may be, if we're still allowed to use such words without undercutting their authority in the next sentence, a masterpiece.

The title comes from Pope Urban's 11th century battle cry, meaning, "God wills it!" The book is even more historically accurate than "Son of the Morning Star" (there is no speculation). What makes it a "novel," in fact, is only Connell's employment of the voice of the scribe Jean de Joinville. Joinville, utterly without anachronism, tells us the story of the 200-year crusades, when Christians set out to slaughter the "heathen Muslims." Connell keeps the narrator confined within historical and conceptual limits, which shows the sharp contrast of morality then and now. Anecdotal asides show the murder of innocent Jews along the way (written with triumphant, disturbing braggadocio), and captured knights subjected to some seriously venal cruelties, including but not limited to being covered by excrement and led around by their entrails. The book, like "Son of the Morning Star," is drenched in blood. And it can be a bit of a hard read at first, as it moves with such violent historical sweep at a rate of about a year every two pages. Yet once you settle into it, once you realize it is like no other novel written, its remarkable and subtle intelligence is awe-inspiring.

It's no surprise that Connell is interested in this subject. After reading the book, his career, his art, made perfect sense to me. The roots of our civilization are soaked in blood. He didn't make that up. Connell's just obsessed with exploring it. Earl Summerfield, Muhlbach, Mr. and Mrs. Bridge, Custer, the explorers and adventurers of the essays, the alchemists and Jean de Joinville are all characters on the same time line, all sprung from the same ideological basis, for both better and worse. Connell has been on a quiet mission, as an artist, historian and, perhaps most of all, as a gloriously insidious philosopher of our true heritage, for more than 50 years. He's produced five unexpected, wholly original American classics. Living American authors of his stature can be counted on one hand.

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