Word: manos
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...HEAVEN! by D. Keith Mano. 226 pages. Doubleday...
...first the title cavorts in the mind, a comical inversion of the cliche. By the end of D. Keith Mano's new novel, though, the resonances and realities of the words have lost all irony. They have become literal, horrifying statement...
...Keith Mano's concern, however, is not with polemics or politics. He is absorbed, instead, by two seemingly antithetical characters: Jones, a disgruntled, cowardly medic who is a cranky version of Catch-22's manic Yossarian, and the patrol leader, Sergeant Hook, whose claw is a spiritual but deadlier version of Captain Hook's famous iron hand...
...name of his absolutist faith is cruelly vengeful and it puts his Christianity in darkest question. Indeed, his cruelty places him beneath the craven Jones. For Jones, life is dear even though he does not know how to live it lovingly. For Hook, life is disastrously cheap. Mano seems to suggest that despite Jones' selfishness, there is more cowardice, a more profound "giving up," in Hook's idealism. That idealism eyes heaven too hungrily and, at its tortured extreme, sees war as salvation because in death there...
...Heaven! is Mano's third book (Bishop's Progress, Horn) and his third troubled study of guided or misguided faith confronting worldliness. A wise and gifted novelist, Mano pierces real human flesh with his intellectual thorns...