THE FIG TREE by Aubrey Menen...

THE FIG TREE by Aubrey Menen (Penguin: $7.95). Having abandoned his boyhood dream of inventing an oral contraceptive, mild-mannered, inhibited Harry Wesley dedicates his life to improving agricultural production and increasing the world food supply through applied biochemistry. But his research goes wildly awry when the growth serum he’s injected into an experimental fig tree produces a fantastically potent aphrodisiac. The ensuing series of logical yet improbable complications involving an idle American heir and an impoverished Italian countess take Harry to Rome’s most redoubtable bastion of moral orthodoxy: the Holy Office. “The Fig Tree” originally appeared in 1957, and Harry’s understated professional credo provides an interesting counter to the contemporary elevation of science to the status of a secular religion: “We (scientists) won’t be able to make a jelly out of the contents of some bottles and then watch it crawl off the lab bench. . . . I say we’re never going to have machines that think or babies in bottles or any of that nonsense. We’re going to have to be much more modest.”