Beamless Lighthouse

A CEREMONY OF INNOCENCE by Robert Wool. 308 pages. World. $5.95.

A power play by the CIA to maintain the United States' dominant position in Latifundia, a fictional South American country, sounds like the inevitable background for one more pale carbon copy of The Ugly American. Classified communiques pop up like toast at the breakfast table, a recording device is hidden in a tie clip, new leaders are found by a spin-the-bottle technique, and the real rapport between nations rests on a Jellolike foundation of friendship between Latifundia's President and the American ambassador. Despite the apparently insurmountable handicap of so familiar a scenario, Robert Wool has managed to produce a finely written first novel that explores the personality of a South American nation while revealing the lives and characters of two strong and complex men. Neither of them fits the good-guy, bad-guy stereotypes that infect not only this literary genre but diplomatic thinking about Latin America in general.

Octavio Demasiado, the President of Latifundia, is an odd political animal—part pure schemer, part selfless leader. An ex-football hero and the son of a prostitute, he is as wily and emotional in his diplomatic dealings as a wildcat forced to play parlor games. Almost his opposite in personality and background is Carl Aspinwall, the U.S. Ambassador to Latifundia. Harvard-educated scion of an aristocratic New England family, Aspinwall has tried to build a diplomatic career on plain dealing, only to find his word and position repeatedly betrayed by shifts in policy.

Confounded once more by a CIA coup, which deposes his friend Demasiado, he suddenly sees his carefully dedicated life about to be destroyed by political duplicity. Fleetingly, the U.S. Embassy becomes a symbol of the blind arrogance and wastefulness of all great powers. "He walked around the corner and saw the Embassy, every light on, the only building on the street with a bulb burning, a beamless lighthouse with all its light shining in on itself."

In or out of power, visionary Demasiado goes on scheming for American (or Russian) money to build a dream capital in the jungles of his country. Aspinwall goes on fighting to prove that honesty, if not justice, will prevail in political affairs. As the author records in lean, reportorial prose, in any struggle to salvage both dignity and power from such a situation, the winner takes nothing. Well, almost nothing.