Though a Rose Has Thorns

The time period of the novel spans the life of Jewel Carpenter McLain (1900-1995) from the age of fourteen to a few months after her death. As a precocious child living in India, Jewel receives most of her education from an Indian scholar-tutor and from her parents library. Even at this early stage she already has an uncompromising aversion to violence. At nineteen, she leaves India for Cambridge to continue studying languages. She is diverted from her studies by an encounter with very poor children and devotes much of her time helping them and educating them. Malcolm McLain, who had met her in India convinces Jewel to marry him, to move with him to the United States, and to help him use his inherited wealth to help people in need. Jewel continues to help destitute people wherever she finds them for the rest of her life.

A second story line concerns an American of Lebanese descent, Yussuf Aqami, an electrical engineer who marries Harriet Adnan, a Turkish-born musician. Shortly after their marriage, Yussuf becomes an international dealer in weapons. This distresses his wife, who, along with her artistic friends, has spent much of her time protesting the United Statess use of military force in international affairs. However, she feels bound to Yussuf both because of Islamic tradition and because she is pregnant. It takes another seventeen years for Harriet to leave Yussuf when he develops an hysterical fear of being assassinated. Yussuf finds refuge from his fear by losing himself in a large crowd of people, part of a growing international cult, who assemble to listen to a mysterious flute.

A third story line involves an assortment of scientists: biochemists Dante Peroni and Sybil Sporn, and several others from various fields. Sybil meets Jewel McLain one day in Bombay, where Jewel tries to convince her to pursue particularly challenging research even though it may jeopardize her career by not producing immediate publications. Several years later, when Sybil decides to search for a genetic cause of violence, Jewel agrees to finance a small research institute for this purpose, and Dante joins Sybil in the enterprise. The research group is beset by a dilemma of how to distinguish violent people from the nonviolent. (A distracting example is a man with a lifelong devotion to nonviolence, who spends the final months of his life assassinating weapons merchants as a means of promoting peace in the world.) In the end, using the blood of prison inmates who are differentiated for their violent or nonviolent attributes by their wardens, the research group finds a correlation that suggests that they are on the road to finding the correct gene. A correlation, of course, may be meaningless. Todd Werben, a young black chemist, is very concerned about the possible abuses of their discovery if they should ever succeed.

The cult of those who listen to a mysterious flute encompasses a growing portion of the world and touches the lives of almost everyone in the novel.