ACROSS TIME AND CULTURES, THE BITTER LEGACY OF HATE

Author: By Matthew Gilbert, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, June 1, 1997

Page: N22

Section: Books

Not that the narrative of ``The Nature of Blood'' is a mass of confusion requiring constant logistical and geographical effort. With the help of Phillips's sure hand and rhythmic prose, it flows smoothly between vignettes, returning most frequently to the stories of two characters, Eva Stern and Othello. Suddenly free of the Nazi sadism that has separated her from her beloved sister and parents, Eva, 21, resists leaving the concentration camp, numbly accustomed to the foul smell and the imprisonment and afraid to let go of her memories. ``I have locked myself in this hut among the ghosts of strangers,'' she says. ``What is happening to me that I prefer to be in this hut?'' She is befriended by a British soldier who, devastated and guilt-stricken by the gruesome remains left in the camp, wants to chase away Eva's depression and hallucinations and become her ``knight in shining armor.''

Meanwhile, Othello, famous for bravery in battle, arrives in Venice to lead the army in ``impending conflict with the ever-vengeful Turk.'' Until the clash, however, he's a man of leisure disconcerted by feelings of alienation from the customs and racial prejudice of Venetian culture. ``My reputation,'' he says. ``It was to be hoped that this one small word might lay to rest any hostility that my natural appearance might provoke. . . . Some among these people, both high and low, were teaching me to think of myself as a man less worthy than the person I knew myself to be.'' He falls for Desdemona, of course, which we know to be only the beginning of his problems.

Phillips has written the mostly first-person stories of Eva and Othello as streams of thought that curl effortlessly around powerful bits of poetic insight as they move onward. Eva's contemplation of the ``communal flight'' of the birds near the camp, and Othello's passion for the winding city of Venice and ``her enchanted promises,'' are elegant touches to story lines that are both premised by violence, hatred, and loneliness. If there is a problem with these characters, it is their overfamiliarity. Othello, obviously, has had his share of portrayals over the centuries, and Phillips's version is not strikingly original. And though Eva's fate is tragic, she seems only half realized as an individual. Similarly, the novel's sub-story of 15th-century Jews accused of murdering a Christian boy is a witch hunt that goes exactly where you expect. While the juxtaposing of these and other pieces is provocative and ambitious, the pieces themselves run the risk of cliche.

It's not until late in ``The Nature of Blood'' that the desire for some thematic unity and explanation begins to distract. Why these stories? And why the many literary devices in and around them? Always a fan of broad technical shifts, Phillips deploys a formal arsenal that includes italic dream sequences, first- and third-person trade-offs, and repetitive parenthetical commentary. He gives us the voice of a doctor studying the effects of the Holocaust (``These people's conditions were generally chronic''), and he provides us with a number of dictionary-styled definitions, including those of ``Venice,'' ``ghetto,'' ``suicide,'' and ``Othello'' (``A play by William Shakespeare''). Rather than clarify the purpose of the novel's fragmentational approach to storytelling, these theatrical methods push the novel's disunity into a sort of freneticism that feels junky and willfully enigmatic.

What offers relief is the framing story, of Eva's Uncle Stephan, who leaves Germany and his family before the full horror of the Holocaust to live in the idealistic land of Palestine. With the last scene of the novel, Stephan provides a low-key denouement that lends almost everything before it a sense of order. It gives a retrospective purpose to the novel's far-flung episodes, as if the blood histories of Stephan and the black Jewish nurse he befriends wend backward through all the previous stories. It overtly gathers together some of the themes that Phillips has been quietly toying with throughout.

Those themes include racial and religious prejudice in Europe and its corrosive effects on self-image. Spiritual homelessness, too, connects the stories. True to the fictional preoccupations of his earlier novels, Phillips has made all the prominent characters in ``The Nature of Blood'' into wanderers, dislodged by history and looking for a place to rest. Even the Jews who stand trial in Italy are originally from Germany, ``arrived as foreigners, and foreigners they remained.'' The narrative leapfrogging of ``The Nature of Blood'' dramatically re-creates this uprooted quality, portraying displacement while asking the reader to experience the same.