No Other Life.

The presence of the Reverend Jean-Bertrand Aristide lies like a fingerprint upon the pages of Brian Moore's new novel. The book dutifully carries a disclaimer - any resemblances to actual persons are just coincidences - but only the truly credulous could avoid considering events in Haiti while reading this story of a charismatic priest who gains the presidency of a Caribbean island country, prompting religiously charged hope and civic unrest. Like Moore's novels Black Robe and The Color of Blood, No Other Life is a small book about big events; this time out, his novel's prescience has prompted unusually thorough lead essays in the New York Times Book Review and the New York Review of Books. From his ambiguous dedication - "To Jean" - onward, Moore has obliged those who seek an adroit blending of fact and fiction, an entertaining gloss on a breaking story. But the real interest here lies in the way Moore, rather than imaginatively enlarging life, has narrowed it down so that its hard truths strike the reader cleanly and sharply.

The novel is narrated by one Paul Michel, a French Canadian priest who, after two decades serving the poor of Ganae, is "looking at the empty pages of my life," and mainly at his relations with the Reverend Jean-Paul Cantave, whom he affectionately calls Jeannot. As a young priest, Michel rescued Jeannot, an orphan, from a squalid village, adopted him as a son of sorts, and had him educated in the Catholic schools that serve Ganae's mulatto elite. Eventually Jeannot, following Michel's example, became a priest, and now, serving the poor as pastor of the Church of the Incarnation, he has emerged as a powerful leader, "small and frail in cheap white cotton trousers and peasant shirt, slack as a puppet on strings until the microphones were readied and the media people signaled that it was time to begin." Inevitably, Jeannot is drawn into politics. "The history of Ganae," Michel observes, "is like a cheap gramophone record. The new tune plays for a while, then the needle sticks in the groove and the player-arm slumps back and slips off the disc." Ganae's military dictator is dying of AIDS. Elections are called, and Michel suggests that Jeannot run for president as the candidate of the poor; in one of the exquisite ambiguities that make the novel interesting, Moore leaves unclear whether Michel has planted the seed of ambition in Jeannot's head or just stated aloud what the younger priest was already thinking.

From there, events unfold in a way that resembles Aristide's vexed career. Though Michel is ostensibly looking back on his life, the story is lean and brisk, with very little retrospective hand-wringing. As president, Jeannot challenges the military and the wealthy elite; he ignores or supersedes parliament and packs his cabinet with associates who, like him, espouse liberation theology. His order defrocks him and the Vatican warns him against meddling in politics, accusing him of trying to found a schismatic "People's Church." The people come to think of him as their redeemer, and even as their Redeemer, crying "C'e Mesiah!" when he visits. In a series of rousing speeches - set in blank verse, like the poetic passages in the Jerusalem Bible - Jeannot declares, "Rejoice./You are the people./ You have the power./Use it." Naturally, they riot. A coup is planned, and Jeannot flees to the countryside, with Michel along as spiritual advisor. So begins Jeannot's ultimate fall and rise, which culminates in a subtle final gambit that one suspects Aristide himself would envy.

The novel is no simple fictionalized history: Ganae and its people are described in passages of firm, cold, novelistic beauty, and Moore renounces the most fictionally seductive fact available to him, remaking the brutal "necklace" killings as a series of murders committed with machetes. Even so, the strong similarities to the Haitian situation rob the plot of much of its drama: as events develop, they seem more to conform to the contours of recent history than to unfold according to the novel's own imperatives.

This matters less than it might have, though, because in the end the novel remains Father Michel's story not Jeannot's, and the longest shadow cast over it is not Jean-Bertrand Aristide's but Graham Greene's. Working among Ganae's desperately poor, Michel has become a practical agnostic, and when he returns to Canada to be present at his dying mother's bedside, he is nudged over the edge into unbelief. "Paul, I have prayed all my life," his mother tells him. "I believed in God, in the church. I believed I had a soul that was immortal. But I have no soul. When we die, there is nothing .... There is no other life." As her last wish, she urges him to stop living the lie of his priesthood, and he returns to Ganae doubting that Jeannot's mission is anything but a worldly one; he is now a skeptic even as he regards Jeannot as a kind of saint.

As such, he resembles the protagonists of the writer who depicted Duvalier-era Haiti in The Comedians. Late in his life Greene called Moore his favorite living novelist, and here Moore has repaid the tribute. Michel is a character straight out of Greeneland: a colonialist of sorts in a distant outpost, a moderate among fanatics, a man caught between faith and despair, between the habits of transcendence and the ache in his bones which says this broken world is all there is.

A generation on, however, the terms of this kind of spiritual dilemma have changed significantly. In his time, Greene's straitened and elusive religious outlook was subversive enough to be derided as Jansenist or just plain heretical. Today such an outlook is commonplace. Meanwhile there has emerged, in liberation theology, a religious outlook which, while wary of next-worldly transcendence, locates the hand of God in the shape of political history. This, of course, is Jeannot's theology. "Was I elected to do these things for God's sake, or for the sake of the poor of Ganae? Aren't they the same thing?" So Michel and Jeannot alike affirm that there is no other life, but draw vastly different conclusions. For the blanc priest, the words are an epigram of despair and meaninglessness; for the noir one, they are a divine imperative to do God's work in the here and now. Moore's skillful and thoughtful exploration of the two priests' spiritual lives - now diverging, now running in parallel - is the most satisfying aspect of the novel. "I am nothing./But I am God's servant./God has given me this sword," Jeannot tells the people of Ganae, and he might seem a madman were their circumstances not so grave, and were he not such a charismatic figure. As Michel observes, "This wasn't |liberation theology.' This was a faith built around one man."

For his part, describing a flight out of Ganae, Michel recalls, "My plane...passed over the abandoned buildings of the Bicentennial Exposition Ground, that symbol of Ganae's efforts to imitate other, more fortunate lands. But the people of Ganae know no other lands. They live in a world apart. Even to me as I flew away from it, its endless struggles, its cruelties and despairs seemed a tale so frightening that, if I told it, no one would believe such a place existed." Such a place does exist, and in No Other Life Moore has made it palpable. And despite its characters' protestations that there is no other life, the novel serves as a reminder that there is another life of sorts - that of art, in which despair and deep faith can complement each other in ways that enlarge our apprehension of this life, if not the next one.