Caught in the blur of terrorism

Some of the grand old political slogans don't ring so clear in the age of terror. "Give me liberty or give me death!" Patrick Henry cried at the end of his heroic speech in 1775. And since 1969 the people of New Hampshire have stamped "Live Free or Die" on their license plates. I used to think that was a glorious choice. But now, as the world seems daily torn by men unwilling to compromise or deliberate, that spirit of absolutism sounds fatalistic, even fatal. I wish I could hear more of the sentiment from the gracious opening of Henry's speech in which he admitted, "Different men often see the same subject in different lights."

A penetrating novel called "Pearl," by Mary Gordon, explores the allure of political extremism in starkly personal terms. How glorious, Gordon asks, is the choice between ideals or death when a loved one is choosing suicide?

The story opens on Christmas night, 1998, in New York when Maria gets a call from the State Department that her daughter, Pearl, has chained herself to a flagpole at the American Embassy in Dublin and may die from starvation. For Maria, who knows Pearl is a shy girl studying languages at Trinity College, this news is as baffling as it is terrifying. She calls Joseph, an old family friend in Rome who thinks of Pearl as a daughter, and the two of them set off immediately for Ireland from their separate locations.

It's a marvel that Gordon makes this so compelling because after those two phone calls, nobody moves or speaks for almost 200 pages. Maria and Joseph are strapped into their seats on different planes; Pearl lies on the cold ground in Dublin. And yet, by tracing how these three very different people have come to their desperate positions, Gordon tells a gripping story.

Impatient, dramatic, and self-righteous, Maria has been protesting since her own youth, when she pored over saints' lives, fantasizing about the glory of martyrdom. Later, when her father moved to protect her from radical friends during the Vietnam War, she cut him off, never spoke to him again, and never regretted showing him that her ideals matter more than anything else.

But now, she's speeding halfway around the world to convince a daughter making her own political protest that "Nothing is worth your life."

Joseph, meanwhile, is conflicted by his own reactions. Reserved where Maria is headstrong, he's torn between the terror of losing his beloved Pearl and the depressing prospect of living in a world in which nothing is worth dying for. How, he wonders, can he possibly save this girl while protecting her from everyone's condescension, from the assumption that she must be deluded to make such a deadly protest?

Of course, neither of them can imagine why Pearl would fast for six weeks and then handcuff herself to an embassy flagpole. "As long as I've known her," Maria thinks, "she's been only marginally aware of politics."

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