There has always been something recognizably distinct in Hans Koning’s novels, a ruthless spareness to the manner, a kind of passionate desperation in the plot. In this new novel, his first for six years, he is even more himself, terse, pared down in language, emotion, and action, with a plot that is close to inexorable. Mr. Koning published, in a recent number of the Paris Review, a short essay, The Kleber Avenue Communion, which in a sense lays the keel for the novel. It is a meditation in Paris on certain solitary and recurring figures in its history who were driven by a fierce sense of justice to a desperate act , at the cost of their lives – in particular, a young Turkish student, Suleiman Aleipin, who assassinated General Kleber in Cairo, where he commanded Napoleon’s army of occupation, and who was then cruelly tortured to death, and a young Italian poet, Lauro de Bosis, who, in the year 1931, after working as a night clerk in a Paris hotel, took flying lessons near Marseilles, and set out one day in a small sports plane to drop anti-fascist leaflets over Rome. De Bosis had minimal flying experience, but he completed his mission. The plane never returned, and soon after The New York Times received and published a long letter, “The Story of my Death,” which De Bosis had written and posted just prior to his flight.

The Kleber Flight translates, as it were, that preoccupation into stark, contemporary terms, into a story that is wonderfully paced, varying between the crisp and the meditative, between action and waiting. David Lum, office manager of a small, threadbare flying school on Long Island, is approached by a young woman who impatiently wants to take flying lessons. He recognizes her as Jean More, to whom he once gave shelter as a young girl during the Chicago riots of 1968. In his growing involvement with her, he is gradually drawn out of his own resignation into becoming both her protector and her blind accomplice. When she dies on the flight she has aimed herself toward he sets out to solve, not just the mystery of her circumstances—she is wanted by the FBI—but of her nature, an intensity of will and decision still beyond him. Caught up in this quest, he goes to Paris to track down her lost daughter, a child of the same tenacity and clarity of her mother. He broods increasingly on the morality of her desperate act, until he eventually undertakes her mission, the Kleber Flight , himself, in his own way. The plot, compelling enough to keep secret, unwinds like the process of Lum’s decision, with an intense narrative thrill. But there is a great deal more to the Kleber Flight than the skill of its story-telling.

Embedded in the stoiy are David Lum’s meditations , in Paris, on Alepin, on Lauro de Bosis, on Jean More, on Andreas Baader, on the final , unquestioning decision that must move the revolutionary from thought to action, as he calculates, an d justifies, an act of judicious terrorism, shredding every romantic vestige on the way to the act itself. The theme is a stark an d immediate one, for the novel dramatizes an intense, personal confronting of the nuclear horror. The movement of David Lum, from having settled for little more than fleeting pleasures toward the stage of decision expressed in a deliberate act, carries the book’s argument , but is woven into its compelling forward movement., Mr Koning has always been unusually gifted in creating women characters, and in this novel, Beatrix, the young daughter of Jean More, has the clear directness of Claudia in his celebrated novel, A Walk with Love and Death.” The book’s theme is one with which Mr Koning has long been preoccupied, but he has never handled it as skillfully and as affectingly as in this fine novel.