Diamond's Compass: A Novel - Hardcover

A sensitive Air Force cadet arrives on a visit to his parents in Tehran on the eve of the Shah's fall, unaware of the tapestry of coming-of-age experiences that awaits him. The time before Dante Diamond's landing in Tehran is filled with reminiscences of his term at ``the Zoo,'' the Air Force Academy, where one best friend, Mitchell James III, cracked under the pressure to follow in his family's military tradition, and another, Scott Hind, concealed beneath his commanding swagger the prophetic certainty that he would die on April 24, 1980. But even after Dante catches up with his parents--doting Beatrice and gung-ho Brigadier General Thierren Boyd (T-Boy) Diamond--his narrative, and his elliptical letters to his wife Faith, who never appears, are filled with recursive snapshots of his childhood, his Air Force training, and his brief affair with his flight commander Troy Daniels--all pointed toward his recognition of an uncanny affinity he finds within himself for Persian culture. Ghossemi Nehlad, the driver who saved the General from assassination, appreciates and fosters this affinity in ways that are hard to read, eventually matching Dante, a passionate mountain-climber, with a Kurdish sherpa named Asadollah, who may well be an agent of the Shah's secret police bent on sabotaging the planned climb of Kooh Dam vand, Iran's highest mountain. Even the harrowing ascent of Dam vand, however, is shrouded in a mystical reverie that the novel's historical conclusion intensifies still further. An endnote acknowledges that this first novel life as a long poem, and it shows: Liotta's gestures toward melodrama have the effect of providing grist for, or even simply interrupting, the meditations on Iran as seen from a strenuously Western point of view. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Varying perspectives on the countries of the Middle East, particularly Iran, provide the setting for this intriguing bildungsroman , which juxtaposes the elusiveness of love and trust with the ineluctability of violence and war. Culling information from such diverse sources as letters, military briefings, postcard captions and ancient Persian poetry, poet and essayist Liotta ( Rules of Engagement ; Learning to Fly: A Season with the Peregrine Falcon ) evokes two Irans. Sometime in the future, U.S. Air Force pilot Dante Diamond flies high above one in space-age battle; and in 1978, as a troubled cadet, he visits his parents in the other during the waning days of the Shah. The future war story serves as a frame for reminiscences of that past visit and its lessons, which reach a climax in Dante's near-fatal climb up Mt. Damavand. Liotta writes knowingly of Iran's political predicament and of the riches of Persian culture. His characters are credible and interesting. When cataloging Dante's epiphanies, however, his generally elegant and evocative prose becomes disturbingly florid. Ostensibly pregnant ambiguities and frequent shifts of point of view further obscure the story's insights. Ultimately, this ambitious first novel, despite its accomplishments, leaves too many unanswered questions, both philosophical and practical.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.