ACTS OF FAITH
By Philip Caputo. Knopf. 669 pp. $26.95
Philip Caputo's new novel -- he's best known for his memoir of Vietnam, A Rumor of War , but he also has published four other novels -- takes on big subjects in a big way: too big, but more about that later. Set in and near Sudan during the endless internal warfare that shattered that unhappy country beginning in the 1980s, Acts of Faith is a cautionary tale with two broad themes: the havoc that can be caused by "true believers" motivated by "faith in some particular creed, sect, ideology, cause, or crusade," and the havoc that can be caused by Americans "in their narcissism, in their self-righteousness, in their blindness to their inner natures, in their impulse to remake the world and reinvent themselves, never realizing that the world wishes to remain as it is and that oneself is not as malleable as one likes to think."
Three Americans are central to the tale: Douglas Braithwaite, a magnetic but naive and enigmatic young man who establishes Knight Air, which flies relief supplies to Sudan; his partner, Wesley Dare, also a pilot, much older, who, "having seen what true believers were capable of . . . had turned disbelief into a kind of belief in itself"; and Quinette Hardin, a born-again Christian working for an aid organization called WorldWide Christian Union, who is resolutely going native, trying "to transform herself from a plain prairie flower into a brilliant and irresistible African orchid."
All three are trying, in their different ways, to aid the Nuba people, who live in the hills of central Sudan and are the country's largest non-Arab group. Caught between the National Islamic Front government in Khartoum and the rebels of the black-African Sudanese People's Liberation Army (SPLA), the civilian Nuba are in danger of starvation, even extinction, and an international relief effort -- some of it U.N.-run, some of it church-related, some of it ad hoc and freelance -- has taken shape to help them. Inevitably, it attracts zealots as well as humanitarians, on all of whom Africa works the spell familiar to readers of Joseph Conrad:
"What was it about this place that it created visionaries of all kinds, warrior-prophets and warrior-saints, messiahs true and false, Sufi mystics, dervishes dancing in the desert? Was [a famous pilot] right in saying that Sudan's distances conjure up mirages of the mind, its boundless horizons inspiring men to imagine that anything is possible? Do its skies, so threatening in their vastness and vacancy, foster feelings of insignificance that force men to turn to God for solace and validation of their existence? And does the silence that greets them when they turn -- the unbearable silence of Sudan's immense spaces -- cause them to hear voices in their own heads and trick them into thinking that what they hear is the voice of God, commanding them to sacred missions? And what is it about this place that even as it molds true believers out of its native clay, it also draws true believers from elsewhere? General Gordon, the Christian mystic, tugged to Sudan by his own messianic vision: to abolish the slave trade, and how he tried, with his band of zealots. But the law of unintended consequences operates here like nowhere else."
Indeed it does. Acts of Faith positively abounds in unintended consequences, some of which arise from Knight Air's downward spiral from eleemosynary airlifts to arms-running, some of which arise from the plot's various romantic complications. Wesley Dare, four times married and divorced, falls in love with a much younger pilot, Mary English, and she in turn -- quite to his surprise -- falls in love with him. Fitzhugh Martin -- the novel's most appealing character, who "had come to Kenya from the Seychelles Islands when he was eight years old, the eldest of three children born to a French, Irish, and Indian father and a mother who was black, Arab, and Chinese" -- falls in love with Lady Diana Briggs, who is many years older than he, "a Kenyan citizen, British by ancestry only," and she falls in love with him. Quinette Hardin, not to be outdone, falls in love with Michael Archangelo Goraende, an officer in the SPLA, "a big man with big ideas," and he with her.
This last romance involves going African with a vengeance, with multiple unintended consequences that leave Quinette a whole lot sadder but not a scintilla wiser. She is the embodiment of American innocence and foolishness, as Michael seems to understand at some gut level when he first meets her. When he asks what she speaks "besides English," and she replies, "Nothing. Unless you want to count two years of high school Spanish," his comment is: "I would be delighted to meet someday an American who speaks more than English. You Americans own the world now and you don't have to learn. But someday someone else will own the world, and then you'll have to learn their language. Who do you think it will be? The Russians? The Arabs? The Chinese?"
It's a good question for which, of course, Quinette has no answer. With the notable exception of Wes Dare, all the Americans stumble through the pages of Acts of Faith , making silly and sometimes dangerous mistakes. None of them is worse than Doug Braithwaite, whose veneer of wide-eyed altruism hides a terrible smugness and arrogance. As Fitzhugh says: "He lacks a moral imagination when it comes to himself. He's so certain of his inner virtue that he believes anything he does, even something . . . terrible, is the right thing. Am I making myself clear? The man cannot imagine himself doing anything wrong. It's a blindness. He can't see his own demons because he doesn't think they exist, and so he's fallen prey to them."
Readers who are inclined to interpret Braithwaite's certitude as a metaphor for the current administration and its policies overseas probably are correct. Acts of Faith is very much of the moment, undoubtedly inspired by the events of September 2001 and the American response to them: true believers in the mountain fastnesses of Afghanistan and Pakistan, true believers in the White House and on Capitol Hill. In this novel, as in Philip Roth's The Plot Against America , the parallels between fiction and recent fact seem simply too obvious to be denied; both novels are as much political statements as attempts to make literary art, and they must be viewed as such.
Unfortunately, as literary art Acts of Faith falls considerably short. Caputo is smart, commendably ambitious, immensely knowledgeable about parts of the world that most Americans know (and care) little or nothing about and writes clean prose that's a couple of steps above the journalism he once practiced, but he never manages to get this novel off the ground. To begin with, it's much, much too long -- twice as long as it needs to be. Conversations drag on and on and on, presumably of interest to the characters talking and to the author who put the words in their mouths, but too often of only marginal interest to the vexed, exhausted reader. A couple of subplots could have been eliminated, to the novel's benefit rather than detriment. Though the pace picks up in the final hundred pages or so, for much of the way Caputo seems to be on automatic pilot, going nowhere.
There's good stuff here, in particular Caputo's evocation of the world of the bush pilots. Obviously he knows a lot about flying, and things come quickly to life whenever a plane takes off, but mostly the novel is flat on the ground. No doubt Acts of Faith will be read by Caputo's admirers, but it's likely to tax their patience, and it's not likely to win him many new readers. It's an honorable effort and a serious book, but for most of the way reading it is work rather than pleasure. ·
Jonathan Yardley's e-mail address is yardleyj@washpost.com.
