Herman Melville is as much a presence in this book as Harper Lee is, although the overarching theme of racial divide in a courtroom drama invites easy comparison to "To Kill A Mockingbird."

I am willing to bet my next strawberry shake or salmon sushi on the idea that the Author had Moby Dick firmly in mind in sewing up some important threads for this solid yarn.

The character of Ishmael Chambers is only part that of the original Ishmael in the literary precedecessor. More crucial for the novel's levering of tensions was his incarnation of Captain Ahab's volcanic presence and even physical flaw (they are both missing a limb).

This missing limb not only became a stoke for both characters' animating anger. In Ishmael (Chambers)'s case, its manifestation as a phantom limb became a strong metaphor for his ill-starred love affair. The pain endures long after the the physical thing has ceased to exist.

The tyranny of a sea-faring life is also a crucial thread in the novel and it also asserted itself in the denouement. In a broad sense, the central struggle in the plot was waged with nature all along and not man with man.

Beneath the plotlines, the traumas of the last great war melding into the xenophobic tendencies of island life became the big white whale in this tale. But from here on, the author forged his own rich ways with the characters and created a novel squarely set in the present.

To Africa's graven pagan face was the holy book remade and it was sacrilegiously, spectacularly successful. The book is as primevally (prime evilly in Rachel's broken-down vocabulary) lyrical and robust as most people's instinctive idea of the dark continent.

Yet it holds within it the strong moral temper of an Hawthornian novel, as one reviewer puts it, especially spoken through the character of Leah, the author's mouthpiece for certain political sympathies that would have sunk this novel like a rock if she was allowed any more space than the fourth or a fifth of a book that she was given.

Her twin sister Adah, the former idiot savant and droll philosopher of the brood, was closer to the real spirit of the novel and perhaps, to the author's own deepest inclinations. She has by far, the most memorable opening salvo in the novel, to my mind, to wit: "Sunrise tantalize, evil eyes hypnotize: that is the morning, Congo pink. Any morning, every morning."

That is one of the most concise and imaginative verbal sketching of character I have ever encountered in recent readings. To quote one of the book's most memorable imageries, it's like the eyes inside the tree describing the inside of the tree.

The author was a lot more self-conscious with Rachel, the "dumb blonde" of the brood. Maybe because she herself isn't. The fact that I can pin down this character with the withered strength of a cliche says a lot about how much of a shell she is compared with her red-blooded sisters and even mother who by the way got to be on that stage to act out their heroic issues with the dark continent because of an interesting little trivia which catapulted the story.

Their father, the half-crazed Baptist preacher, was in everlasting atonement for having been spared from the Death March in Bataan during WWII by an act of self-preservation variously interpreted as cowardice. So he is trying to cleanse this instance of moral filth from the muddy banks of Africa's Congo river by proxy, vowing to baptize as many of the dark children as he could, an act interpreted by the locals as a sacrificial offering to the crocodiles and which subsequently cost him his life after that stain of sin in these isles (the Philippine isles) proved uncommonly resistant to the soap of forgiveness, even one self-directed.

There are many such instances of humor, dark as the continent itself, in this book. One of my favorites were the episodes with Methuselah, the African parrot and inherited house pet too eloquent for his own good. He is at once a piece of intransigent Africa and his hapless demise in the jaws of a wild animal a foreshadowing of a greater tragedy that would serve as fulcrum for the last third part of the novel.

This last one went without closure. It is the continent again slipping from the grasp of a bunch of women with the same complexion as its Belgian, French, Portuguese conquerors in the distant past and the Cold War partisans who maintained their local puppet petty despots. Sounds familiar.

Antonia comes off not so much a woman as a force of nature. At least that's how I can finally comprehend how a mere human being --- no matter how forceful of presence --- can have a story built around her life with only a series of trivial even sordid situations to show for it.

The running subtext here is that we are looking at a life that is, well, larger than life. Her biographer, Jim, who go a long way back with her, vacillated between infatuation and reverence.

His bias shaped those of the readers and kept us turning pages in our attempt to find a peg for what made Antonia click. The closest I ever came was a sense of her as both earthy and sublime. If only this translated to a character that we can all understand with our guts instead of a goddess whose motivations is clear only to herself and maybe not even.

That is if she can be thought to have any premeditation at all, instead of being such a creature of the moment. There's something of an animal about Antonia which the author later played up and off her through the almost-feral personality of one of her sons.

It's a good thing that when character development falters there's still the lovely language to fall back on. I covet such gems as being "brushed by the wings of a great feeling." Some of the trifling running commentaries can also be spot on, like the observation about the "curious depression surrounding small towns."

Like Antonia herself, a particularly fine flourish in the human canvas, these created their own little fireworks in what is otherwise a rather plodding narrative.

There's a ferocious integrity about this book that leaves the heroine curiously untainted despite the low toils of the flesh that she willingly subjected herself to.

It maybe that force of her will that is the ultimate statement here. It is a display of willfulness that is patently female (within the context of society's normal gender role-playing) --- subverting by subservience. I'm recalling a scene here where even her oppressors were taken aback by the depths of degradation she was willing to plumb.

Im treading blasphemous territories here, but there are probably a lot of inspirational (and sanitized) tales of Christian saintliness around that follows the internal trajectory of Ms. Reage's erotic tale. One can even say that the ends wound up similar though the means are diametrically opposed -- the body finally is mortified to the point of O (zero).

The author may be talking about episodes usually found in pornographica, but her language has a reverence to it that almost seems to self-consciously tamp down the suggestiveness of the images evoked.

O also stands for open ends. This book seems to float in a vacuum, with even the authorship not established (Pauline Reage is yet to step forward and reveal she/he is no less fictitious as her characters) and motivations not clear. And the only peg to time and place is the occasional unconvincing reference to O's day job as a fashion photographer.

Perhaps that is just as well, for a reader has to be able to inhabit O's world unconditionally to find that place where that "savage wind," referred to in the book's introduction, blows through with equal force through the mind, and most especially the heart, of both heroine and reader.

80-85 percent into this book, I began to feel that no one can stand writing it and then living with an ending (that the book is crashing towards with an inevitable logic by then) without holding a certain compromised view of life in general.

So I did a little spadework on the author, Walter M. Miller, and little wonder, he did a euthanasia on himself after years of spiritual coma.

It invites comparison with another classic that problematized the war-mongering during and in the immediate aftermath of WWII, the vastly more popular "Catch-22." There's that same satirical tone, though of vastly different magnitudes, (Canticle's humor is somewhat subtler) the same character-driven undertones of despair, and foregone assumptions about demi-gods with clay feet and putty brains running the world's affairs.

But I find "Canticle..." richer in imagination, plot-wise. The idea of a new descent into the Dark Ages leads one to ask 'why not' rather than brace for a suspension of belief, even if the notion seems so farfetched now in this technology-driven age.

It doesn't ask us to imagine new worlds, just reconfigure the one we're in based on a belief that at the heart of rationality and high moral impulses, there could be a runaway drive towards self-destruction.