THE FOUR WISE MEN
by Michel Tournier
Translated from the French by Ralph Mannheim
256 pp., including postscript and notes
The John Hopkins University Press Baltimore
ISBN 0-8018-5733-3
$15.95 paper

This deceivingly simple novel is pretty much open to whichever
interpretation the reader chooses to bring to it. A parable, a fable, a
skewed biblical history, a fantasy, a religious tract, a spiritual
experience - they're all there.
Three of the wise men are the traditional Magi; Gaspar, Balthasar and
Melchior, each describing his personal odyssey to Bethlehem to honor the
new-born Christchild. The fourth is an apparently an invention. Taor, son
of an Indian maharajah and Prince of Mangalore, who sets off on his
journey for another reason altogether; who arrives too late for the birth,
misses out on the Last Supper as well, and whose odyssey - betrayed by his
trusted servants, stripped of his wealth, imprisoned in the salt mines of
Sodom for 33 years, brought to a state of physical enfeeblement - is the
most poignantly beautiful of all.
Or perhaps the Prince of Mangalore is not entirely an invention, for
Russian myth tells of a fourth who traveled from India and who, while not
reaching Bethlehem in time for the birth got there in time to rescue a
group of children from Herod's Massacre of the Innocents. The taste of
ashes of this incident in Tournier's telling is that the children
"rescued" were in fact not the ones slated to be massacred.
Tournier is a myth-teller who is keeping myth and mythic history alive, if
off-the-wall. He states, "A dead myth is called allegory. The writer's
function is to prevent myths turning into allegories." Be that as it may,
his work imaginatively recreates, with densely-textured embellishments,
well-known stories or incidents or persons or events in the form of
parodies in order to incisively comment on the contemporary world.
Before becoming one of France's best-known writers with his publication of
Friday, an adaptation of the classic Robinson Crusoe story which won the
Grand Prix de Roman in 1967, Tournier was a philosopher and a journalist,
in itself a rather bizarre coupling. He wrote for French radio and
television, was chief editor for a publishing firm and completed three
novels, which he "did not considered worthy of being offered for
publication."
Using myths and re-tellings as themes for his commentaries, he has
reconciled philosophy with fiction. His second novel, The Ogre, which won
the Prix Goncourt, combines the myths of St. Christopher and the Erl King,
set against the background of Nazi Germany during World War II. Another is
Gilles & Jeanne, about Joan of Arc's companion, a perverted murderer.
While the message in The Four Wise Men might be rich with intellectual
irony, the tale-telling is pure beauty in the cadence and balance of
Tournier's prose. Not that it can't also be ghastly. The chapter, "Herod
the Great," is horrifying, not only in the moral debasement of Herod as
king ("the laws of morality and justice don't apply to questions of
power"), but in the cruelty and callousness of the history of his reign,
told in his own voice at a scathingly chilling banquet given for the three
travelers. Taor was too late to attend.
The essence of Tournier's message is redemption, and the metamorphoses of
the three Magi can be told in the tale of Gaspar alone.
Prince Taor, whose story of redemption is the saddest, but also the most
beautiful, is another matter and not to be given away here.
The four make their journeys for reasons other than paying homage to the
newborn Christ. Gaspar, because of a personal dichotomy caused by his
negritude; Balthasar, because of the beauty of butterflies; Melchior,
seeking redress and revenge because he had been deposed by a murderous
uncle; and Taor, in search of the recipe for rachat loukoum, a confection
which obsesses him.
"I am black, but I am a king." This opening phrase contains the essence of
the journey of Gaspar, although it begins with the comet, the long-haired
star, a star with golden hair - indeed, the Star of Bethlehem - which his
court astrologer views as a threat to the kingdom. But Gaspar equates the
appearance of the star with the golden hair of Biltine, a white slave girl
recently bought and whose whiteness fascinates him to the point of
obsession. The catalyst to follow the comet northward is in the form of an
encounter with an old man, mysteriously come upon in the desert night.
"Everything about him was white, a white apparition floating in an ocean
of blackness; the muslin veil that enveloped the old man's head, his long
beard, his cloak, his long diaphanous hands, and even a mysterious lily in
a slender crystal vase on the table. I filled my eyes, my heart, my soul
with the sight of so much serenity, so as to gather comfort by returning
to it in thought if passion should someday knock at my door
 Gaspar goes on to say, "I wouldn't have admitted it then, but already I
knew that blondness had broken into my life and threatened to lay it
waste."
Ostensibly, the journey is an official visit to Herod, King of the Jews,
and it is at Jerusalem that Gaspar's great caravan finally arrives, there
to meet Balthasar, King of Nippur and Melchior, Prince of Palmyra. As if
two tourists, Balthasar and Gaspar meet on the field of earth from which
Yaweh molded Adam before moving him to the Garden of Eden.
Here Tournier peers into the homogeneity of mankind and the effect of
legend on all of us. "Legends live on our substance," he says, "They
derive their truth from the complicity of our hearts. If we cannot
recognize our own story in them, they are dead wood and dry straw."
Sifting the clay in their fingers, the two kings find it is not white.
Black, perhaps, with traces of brownish-red, at which Balthasar is
reminded that in Hebrew, 'Adam' means ocher-red. Adam could well be black,
they decide, but they are left with a paradox. Eve was created from Adam
and therefore must also be black, but both of them definitely see her as
white - Gaspar, not only as white, but as blond. A paradox indeed, but
such underlies each of the traveler's tales from motive to conclusion.
The birth of the Christchild is the focus of their redemption, but it is
also somewhat of an aside as the focus of their jouirneys. Another
paradox.
The book itself is a paradox, but it's a wonderful book.