It becomes more and more common that a book feels like a memoir, essay or reportage but is called fiction, and at book's end one finds oneself protesting: "That's not a novel." The source of the protest is not, I think, either devotion to literary orthodoxy or a concern that a spade be called a spade. It is just that most often when journalism is called fiction, the authority of honest reportage is mysteriously lost without the command of imaginative transformation having been gained, and sometimes atrocities of language clearly related to the ambition released by the words "a novel" are committed as well. The book under review is a case in point.

Oriana Fallaci is an Italian journalist famous the world over for her political interviews. Indignantly democratic and possessed of a vigorous hatred of dictatorship, Miss Fallaci's work is characterized by a pugnacious insistence, somewhat like that of an aroused child stamping her feet and demanding to be told the truth. From her inviolate position behind the microphone she points, probes, insinuates and mocks, provoking her subjects—mainly men of great power—into regretted revelation. The results are almost always scandalous, distasteful and remarkably effective. Miss Fallaci the journalist is master of her trade.

In August 1973 Miss Fallaci flew to Athens to interview Alexander Panagoulis, a Greek political dissident who had spent five years in prison for an attempted assassination of the dictator George Papadopoulis, and who had just been freed by a general amnesty. These two took one look at each other and both knew instantly that destiny had been achieved. Especially Miss Fallaci. She really knew. When Panagoulis asked her why they hadn't met before, where had she been when he'd been caught, tortured and imprisoned, she had to answer: "Saigon … Hanoi … Sao Paulo … Amman … Calcutta." But she hastened to assure him that they had met before—many times in fact: "You were to have many faces, many names, in those years. In Vietnam you were a Viet Cong girl with cheeks and chin and forehead defaced by scars…. In Bolivia you were the last of the Peredo brothers, the first [of whom] had died with Che Guevara…. And then you were a Dominican monk whose face and age I didn't even know." Only in order to accomplish their fate, it had been necessary to wait until this moment for them actually to come together.

A Man is a 463-page account of the three-year-long affair between Miss Fallaci and Panagoulis, begun at their meeting, conducted through a nonstop disheveled flinging about between Athens and Rome, and brought to a distraught end in May 1976 when Panagoulis was ambushed and killed in Athens. Written in the form of an elegiac address to the dead man, it is in effect a journalist's recital of the events of those years, masquerading as a historical romance of the kind that can only be called torrid-mythic. Panagoulis is for Miss Fallaci openly and unashamedly a figure of fantasy—a hero of legendary proportions, not an actual man at all but an incarnation of spiritual resistance (political resistance is here clearly a metaphor). As such, he—his life, his person, his immediate history—is described in language that would draw from D'Annunzio an admiring "So that's how you do it these days."

The words "destiny" and "fate" are used repeatedly in this book, along with a steady, rhythmic variation on the phrase "This is the tragedy of a man condemned to be a poet, a hero, and thus to be crucified." These words and phrases, surrounded by whole paragraphs of a suffocating thickness, are like bits of lard studded throughout an old-fashioned dish of hearty melodrama being offered as though it were the cuisine of tragedy.

There is a certain sense in which A Man is not only ludicrous, but offensive as well. In a time of unimaginable cruelty, when we are surfeited by accounts without number of daily atrocity, the only way to convey the pain and dread of an honest rebel's life in some police-state part of the world is through the sparest of prose, the leanest of eloquence. What one feels here is not only Miss Fallaci's inability to trust in the emergence of the inherent power in Panagoulis's life by writing quietly about it, but her unwillingness as well. The syntax must be inflated to include a self-portrait of Oriana running about Greece and Italy with her freedom fighter, he acting out the anti-social behavior his existential tragedy has entitled him to in her eyes, she all self-important nerve endings, registering herself hourly as an intimate of history.

In a rather astonishing passage toward the end of the book, Miss Fallaci—writing as though she's now going to set the record straight with an "honest" admission—announces that she never did love Alekos. He was sexually repellent to her (not to mention compulsively unfaithful), had the character of a primitive and a mind in a state of permanent intellectual arrest. In those pages we suddenly see Panagoulis for what he is: A caricature of smoldering force (shoulders braced, eyes narrowed, one foot pawing the ground) being made flagrant use of by a writer whose sense of things is foolish and self-deceived. The other side of Miss Fallaci's foot-stamping righteousness in the presence of dictatorship is the eager plunge into "passionate enslavement" to the poetic ideal: two parts of an adolescent's rebelliousness, neither one having much to do with independence of mind or spirit.

What makes Miss Fallaci's journalism useful is her mythic sense of political evil. What makes her "fiction" trashy is her mythic sense of the hero. In the first instance, since it is in her psychic interest to distance herself, her intelligence and temperament serve her well. Since it is also in her psychic interest to merge herself in the second instance, she comes to disaster. It is conceivable that A Man might have had power and integrity if Miss Fallaci had had the wisdom and self-control to write an honest piece of reportage.