Books: Onlookers At A Revolution PERSIAN NIGHTS

At least as far back as Sir Walter Scott's Waverley, novelists have been interested in setting imaginary characters loose against a background of authentic, tumultuous events. Small wonder. History is, after all, drama readymade, an endless pageant playing at all hours in the public domain. Writers who elect to fuse their private inventions with the collective memory of an actual past can create electrifying effects. Witness the towering achievements of War and Peace or the enduring popular appeal of Gone With the Wind. The formula has its pitfalls, of course, in the hands of the inept: cardboard people posing stiffly in front of papier-mache reconstructions. Even so, fiction that dovetails with fact remains alluring to authors and readers alike.

Persian Nights shows why. Author Diane Johnson's sixth novel transports a handful of Americans into Iran during the summer of 1978. These remarkably ordinary visitors have no way of knowing they have jetted into a maelstrom, a seething revolution that will soon topple the Shah, rearrange the balances of power and terror in the Middle East and seriously frazzle two successive American presidencies. But in hindsight from 1987, when all of this is known, anyone who was in Iran then, even only in make-believe, can be made to seem interesting.

Johnson's heroine is Chloe Fowler; she and Jeffrey, her husband of twelve years and a renowned thoracic surgeon, take off for a two-month visit to a medical school and hospital in Shiraz, where he will serve as a consultant and she will pursue a brief study of Sassanian pottery. Awaiting a connecting flight in London, Jeffrey learns of an emergency in his medical practice and decides to return to San Francisco. He urges Chloe to go on ahead without him; Sara and Max, their two small children, will be fine with the plans already made for their care back home, and Jeffrey will join her in Iran as soon as he can. Chloe agrees reluctantly but with a little thrill as well. She knows that another American visitor scheduled to appear in Shiraz is Dr. Hugh Monroe, with whom she has tentatively begun a love affair.

When Chloe arrives, odd woman out, Western and husbandless in the tight society of Iranian and American couples at the medical dormitories, she finds that Hugh is unaccountably missing. She takes pleasure in her disappointment: "With Hugh not there she could pay in advance for anticipated pleasures, pay by uncertainty, solitude, and serious study, in a land hostile to women, far from her children, in an ugly room. What destiny could then begrudge her just a little fling?" Such a question, in the context of Iran, turns out to be poignantly beside the point.