The Sign of the Cross: Travels Through Catholic Europe.

Colm Toibin Pantheon, $24, 296 pp.

The Sign of the Cross is part story of a pilgrimage, part travel book which offers to take us in the company of its author on "Travels through Catholic Europe." We go with Colm Toibin, the forty-year-old Irish novelist, critic, and journalist, to many places: to Lourdes to bathe in the waters, to Seville to see the Palm Sunday procession, to Vilnius to try to understand the Lithuanian church, and, with dangers of war as backdrop, to Medjugorje in Croatia to a shrine of the Virgin. With the author we interview believers, converts, professors of literature, visionaries, and politicians; and with Toibin, we "cheat" in various ways on peregrination to Saint Jacques at Compostela. There are some remarkable moments: his characterization of the pope's effect upon the crowds at the monastery of the Black Madonna (Jasna Gora); the careful exegesis of his response to the Bach Saint John Passion sung in a Regensberg chapel; an interview with an Austrian theologian. And there is a topicality to it all, especially the travels through the former Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia.

However, in a book about so many different places the recourses the writer adopts run the risk of becoming formulaic--a contact in a foreign place, an interview, rambling about the city, going to a service during Holy Week, exploring the connections between Catholicism and politics, and alternating between lapses into mysteries of the soul and lapses back into lapsed Catholicism. Toibin also does a great deal of unhappy late-night drinking in bars. In fact, he seems to be very unhappy with much of what he does. There is a Hemingway-like toughness to the narration and much reporting of dialogue without comment. And with that (pace Hemingway), a sort of gracelessness under pressure of grace which is the worrying tone of the book.

If a Catholic who has lapsed from his faith sets out on a pilgrimage to look at "Catholic Europe," what, we may ask, is he likely to find? Not the Heavenly Jerusalem in any of its manifestations. It's fair to hazard that he will discover estrangement from the faithful. We can infer that the motive which drives the pilgrim has got something to do with strong childhood experiences in the church, so we can also guess that the traveler will find his past self in memory, also estranged. And the third likelihood is that he will find others like him, strangers in lands of the spirit which they once called home. He will also find himself back where he started; very much an inhabitant of the inns and taverns of this world.

Another question comes to mind: why would we want to follow him? The Sign of the Cross is not a conversion story, nor is it a wrestling with theological issues. Colm Toibin can claim attention as an observer of character and place. His audience appears to be those who lived deeply Catholic childhoods which were crossed by Vatican II and by coming of age. Adulthood for them meant growing out of faith. Toibin is offering them witness: he wants to record histories, personal and national, of distinctly Catholic communities like that of his own Enniscorthy in Ireland. In doing so he is finding himself, through similarity and through difference. The reader might find a similar opportunity for self-discovery, especially those of us who like the author are unhappily lapsed. There is one point where Toibin seems to center on the purpose of his book: he questions Jim McCormack, a middle-aged Glasgow University student, as to why, astonishingly, there is but one Catholic

Scottish novelist. In the course of the conversation, the rich details of life in a minority Catholic community emerge. Toibin remarks: "I don't remember if I said that there were at least two or three novels in what he had told me, and more, perhaps, in what he had left out, and that his; country, despite itself, needs Catholic novelists, especially lapsed ones."

The Sign of the Cross tries in nonfiction form to answer that need, for Scotland and for all the many places Toibin visits. Experiences defined by Catholicism should be made public. Consider the minute particulars; don't let the details slip; record what is unique and share it as such.

Toibin's two novels, I must admit, promised a great deal. The South and The Heather Blazing are powerful tales which work on many levels but are particularly successful in evoking worlds the narrator is too young to know. They are acts of a strong imagination and I recommend them highly. Whatever happened when the reporter replaced the novelist, I am not sure, but some of The Sign of the Cross suffers from spareness that borders on weariness. The book is not slackly written; the writer has a job to do and gets it done. He has filled out his form, kept his contract to meet and discuss issues with whomever his contacts in Catholic Europe might be, but as the narrator indicates, often he would very much like to cheat, finish early, and get home. There is a second book framing the travel book, unsettling as much of the latter is subdued. It marks a pilgrimage into the past to recognize suppressed grief. Sorrow over his father's death lies buried with Toibin's memories of the funeral rites. The central chapter in which he records this quest gives the collection its name; it is anticipated in the first chapter and in a sense is bidden farewell in the last. The synecdoche involved is deliberate and shows something of the novelist's craft: the journey within which mimics the journey without, desire for reconciliation with the earthly father recalls the need for unity with the heavenly father. In the moment of crisis presided over by a priestly psychiatrist, Toibin finds a sort of healing in dredging up a sign, the sign of the cross. Ambiguously but not transcendentally, the cross that is the mark of his religion marks also his family heritage and identity. The last chapter, "The End of Time," tells us that the profound passions and allegiances which made him what he is exist no more; what was is the stuff of novels. The Great Book of Life is literature. And his unhappy message is that indeed.

Edward T. Wheeler is dean of the faculty at the Williams School in New London, Connecticut.