Tales of a Long Night

Over the past year or two the German novelist Alfred Doblin has aroused more interest in this country than he ever did during his lifetime, thanks partly to Rainer Werner Fassbinder's film version of ''Berlin Alexanderplatz'' and partly to the appearance of an English translation of ''November 1918,'' Doblin's trilogy about the abortive German revolution led by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. ''Tales of a Long Night'' is the story of a young Englishman called Edward Allison who loses a leg during World War II and returns home a nervous as well as a physical wreck, tormented by doubt and anger, and obsessed with what seems to him the mystery of where the blame for the war really lies. He is released from a clinic in the hope that living among his family will hasten his cure, but he simply transfers his fixation with hidden guilt to the domestic front. Why does his father - a successful author - seem to reject him? What is the secret struggle being waged between his parents? Why does he feel that he is the child of a tainted past? In an effort to exorcise his demons, the Allisons and their friends start telling a series of stories, many of them variations on ancient myths and legends. Some of these tales serve to reveal the character of the storyteller, others as a riposte or as a comment on what has gone before. All of them are meant to advance the psychological and spiritual action. Many of the tales of D"oblin's long night have an undoubted lurid power. But there are too many of them, and they ramify too rapidly. We move through an expressionist phantasmagoria from a wayward bus in Los Angeles to Pluto and Proserpina, by way of Michelangelo and Salome and a mock-medieval tale about the Virgin. Edward's mother, Alice Allison (a significant name, we can be sure), spins variants of a story about a mother who waits for her son to come back from the war, now in Montmartre, now in Germany, and elaborates on the already elaborate legend of her patron saint, Theodora. In the final stages of the book the distinction between framework and fantasy starts to break down completely. Yet through the haze it is possible to discern a continuous story unfolding. The unreality is heightened by an English setting that is in some respects quite weirdly un-English.At its deepest levels it is heavily colored by Doblin's religious convictions - an agnostic Jew, he converted to Roman Catholicism in 1940 - and there can be no doubting the seriousness with which he devotes himself to major themes.