This first work of fiction to explore the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., follows Matthew Bishop, a devoted follower of the civil rights leader, as he trains Chaym Smith, whose startling resemblance to King earns him the job of official stand-in. 125,000 first printing. Tour. At the center of National Book Award winner Charles Johnson's novel Dreamer are three remarkable men: Martin Luther King Jr.; his aide, Matthew Bishop, an African American philosophy student; and Chaym Smith, a man who is a dead ringer for the civil rights leader. Not only does Smith resemble King, but he also shares his intellectual voracity, widely read in both Eastern and Western philosophy, proficient in Sanskrit and martial arts, and a talented painter. But where King is deeply spiritual, Smith is a cynic; where King has the full force of his strong beliefs and his strong family heritage, Smith has nothing but a lifetime of misfortune to shape his attitudes. When he offers to become King's stand-in, Johnson creates an ideal situation in which to explore issues long at the heart of the "race issue" in America: the inequality between black and white, even between black and black. As the novel moves forward in time toward that fateful day in Memphis, Johnson concentrates on the relationship between Bishop--the narrator--and Smith, a man who, with better luck, might have been as great as King. Periodically, the author also lets us in on King's own meditations on his life and faith, and the movement to which he has given them. All in all, Dreamer is the kind of novel Charles Johnson does so well: a book about a big subject, chock full of ideas and populated by characters articulate enough to argue them. Johnson, who won the 1990 National Book Award for Middle Passage (LJ 5/1/90), his novel set aboard a 19th-century slave ship, has constructed a new historical fiction whose narrator, Chaym Smith, is a dead ringer for the great Civil Rights leader. (LJ 4/1/98). Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. A novel about Martin Luther King Jr. from the National Book Award-winning Johnson (Middle Passage, 1990, etc.), who continues with his strange combination of high-flown philosophy and down-home folksiness. Ontological antinomianism is Johnson's subject here, and he uses just that kind of heavy-duty words to impresseven bludgeonreaders, who may or may not be willing to follow along in what starts out as a fairly ingenious story. The novel pairs Martin Luther King Jr. with one Chaym Smitha double for the civil rights leader who offers himself to King as a stand-in or decoy. The odd name is, as the narrator tells us, an etymological variant of ``Cain.'' It's ominous, and the omens are all the darker when two sinister FBI agents show up to co-opt the civil rights leader's evil twin and . . . and what? Johnson adduces much paranoid speculation, but there is no clear resolution or anything new about King's assassination, or, indeed, about King himself. We're simply left to imagine whatever skullduggery the FBI could have been up to. Chaym just disappears, and along with him goes any semblance of purpose to all the foregoing exposition. All Chaym says explicitly before he vanishes is that they (the FBI) are blackmailing him and want ``to embarrass'' King in Memphis. He wasn't embarrassed; he was shot. But even if the G-men were somehow behind this, their role is never made clear, and Johnson doesn't offer the vaguest suggestion about the possible use to which the Feds could have put their coerced doppelgnger. Almost as serious a defect in the book, however, is that King's character is never fully developed. We see him as suffering and conventionally saintly, hardly given any real character at all except that he smokes cigarettes and prefers catfish, pigs' feet, and collard greens to lobster. Johnson's in-your-face style seems all the more annoying for having led nowhere, and for having failed to produce any coherent vision of one of the great storylines in the epic of American history. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. Apparently the kind of fiction Johnson wants to write is a fiction that embodies both his love of wisdom and a conviction that the history of black Americans can be usefully re-revealed as a spiritual journey. Reading his important new novel, Dreamer , you can't help being stirred up by his truth seeking and by his passion for ideas, because the ideas he is most passionate about are not heady musings on the nature of reality but ideas to live by, ideas that would help us to become better people and to create a more compassionate world. -- The New York Times Book Review, Dennis McFarland Robert Olen Butler Author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, winner of the Pulitzer Prize Compelling and profound, Dreamer is a book fully equal to its monumental subject, Martin Luther King Jr. Charles Johnson is one of the great treasures of modern American Literature. -- R