When we read a work of fantasy we occasionally wonder what it is about the story that reflects the life and heart of its author. This sometimes tantalizing question is built into the structure of The Chess Garden, a first novel by Brooks Hansen, a young Harvard graduate. Hansen deftly arranges his tale in many layers, historical and fantastic. The determination of how one layer interprets another becomes the reader's appointed quest.

The central figure throughout the book is a brilliant research physician, Gustav Uyterhoeven, who emigrates from Europe to America in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Gustav and his wife, Sonja, take up residence in Dayton, Ohio, and soon charm the townspeople by establishing a public garden next to their house where any and all may wander by to play a variety of board games with one another. Chief among these games is chess, at which the doctor is an acknowledged master. The garden also becomes the site of concerts, lectures, teas, and readings. It grows into the cultural, and perhaps even the spiritual, center of the town-a miniature, ongoing Chautauqua.

At the end of the century, when the good doctor is 77 years old, he leaves home for South Africa, there to serve in the refugee camps maintained by the British for Boer families made homeless by the war. He is interested to do this because he is both Dutch and English by heritage. He is also interested because it was here, in South Africa, that he experienced a dramatic midlife conversion in the presence of a Swedenborgian missionary. And he is interested out of simple compassion, even though his mystical faith teaches a certain detachment from the world. According to Doctor Uyterhoeven, "Perfect compassion will eventually learn perfect detachment and acceptance; and conversely, perfect detachment will learn compassion."

Once in South Africa, Uyterhoeven sends a series of 12 letters back to his wife in Dayton, over the course of nearly a year. The letters never once refer to the Boer camps. Instead, they relate his purported adventures in the island of the Antipodes, where he has supposedly landed after escaping a great maelstrom. The Antipodes are populated by chess pieces, checkers, dice, and dominoes; he makes his way among them in an elusive search for key figures who hold the truth of perfection and forgetting and death.

Back in Dayton, Sonja arranges a public reading of each letter in the still-fr equented chess garden, and each reading takes on the importance of religious ritual. The novel, then, is a skillful interweaving of the history of the doctor's life and the reading of the 12 letters-and many of these contain elaborate tales-within-tales gleaned from the island of the Antipodes.

The flaw in this arrangement is not that Hansen is derivative. A fantasy world made of chess pieces, of course, reminds us of Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, but Hansen's world is truly his own. Neither can his sense of language and structure be faulted; they are almost always exquisite. (The wind chimes, he says, were "chingling from the eaves.") The problem is that there is nothing warm and vital about an old and wise man wandering among checkers and dominoes. The fantasy world that Hansen creates is always clever but seldom enchanting. This problem might be solved, I think, with a young or naive protagonist (like Alice or Gulliver) or a more truly natural setting (like Narnia or Middle Earth). Hansen's protagonist, though capable of quiet wonder, is prone to a sententiousness in the manner of the sage but static Imlac in Samuel Johnson's Rasselas. And Hansen's antipodal fantasy world is one of abstraction, a highly theoretical place. Though I found myself quite interested in the historical Uyterhoeven, his journey through the Antipodes left me without the incentive to find the author in his work.

Indeed, I was left to wonder what, precisely, the game world contributes to the novel. The first and second letters touch on a man and a woman who mourn a child, just as the doctor and his wife mourn the death of their four-year-old son. The final letter recounts the doctor's own death, a drinking of darkness, after which he attains a final, soothing calm: "I have seen her son, and he is in heaven." These episodes bear obvious relevance to their lived reality; much of the rest of the game world, however, has the oblique and indirect quality of dream. Which, of course, may be exactly what Hansen intends.

For the mystical faith of the doctor is a prominent feature of the novel. Soon after the death of his son, Uyterhoeven suffers from a fever in South Africa. In his illness, the doctor sees a vision of this son, which is also a vision of God-"the abiding presence from which the moment emerges in space and time." One is reminded of Tennyson's vision of Hallam and "the living soul" in In Memoriam 95. Indeed, it is one of Hansen's achievements to describe this kind of spiritual epiphany with lucid tact.

Thenceforth the doctor becomes a student of Swedenborg, though not quite a Swedenborgian. In his American years, he gains a reputation as a translator of mystical writings from all faiths. The people of Dayton are disconcerted by the doctor's habit of attending all the churches in town with cheerful indifference, but are won over by the charity of the chess garden. This chess-garden community, the congregation that gathers for the reading of the doctor's letters, comprises the communion of saints for Uyterhoeven's syncretistic faith.

Many writers are in the business of making up communities to suit their particular creeds. The task becomes especially urgent for those writers apparently committed to a kind of religious Esperanto-a synthetic doctrine outside human tradition. This is the task that Brooks Hansen sets for himself, and he does not quite carry it off. The dreamy and respectful behavior of all these nineteenth-century small-town midwesterners is, well, beyond belief.

These criticisms aside, Hansen is to be complimented for his sheer literary ambition and often astonishing sense of style. I found myself pausing over sentences the way one would in a poem. I take his book as the evidence of things not seen, the promise of a talent that is now but not yet. For Brooks Hansen and his readers, good times will come.

The Chess Garden: Or, The Twilight Letters of Gustav Uyterhoeven

By Brooks Hansen

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

481 pp.; $22

Copyright (c) 1996 Christianity Today, Inc./Books & Culture Magazine

September/October 1996, Page 10

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