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The Seven Who Fled

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Frederic Prokosch is the author I would most wish to save from what Gore Vidal has called "time's winged wastebasket." Born in 1908, his career extended from the early 1930's to the 1980's. He combines an extraordinary talent for description and a lush romantic prose style that never crosses the line into being purple with a modern -- nearly existential -- sensibility. One might think the two would conflict, but remarkably they don't. Prokosch invests scenes of near-total bleakness with stunning beauty, and describes scenes of the most intense beauty with a sometimes disturbing detachment. His gift for language surpasses any American of his era except Fitzgerald (and they are neck and neck), but the quality of his thought is clearer. Fitzgerald learned his style from Keats, but Prokosch seems by temperament much more capable of the negative capability Keats extolled. The influence of Prokosch, who was perhaps more widely read in Europe than in the U.S. (his home country), can be found in magical realism (Garcia-Marquez, Bowles) and in the current generation of European authors (Rushdie, Kundera, etc.).

_The Seven Who Fled_ is Prokosch's second novel, a follow-up to _The Asiatics_, whose debut had brought him considerable critical praise. Both novels are set in Asia, a continent Prokosch knew at that time only from maps and National Geographic surveys. Whereas _The Asiatics_ follows one young American from Beirut to Hong Kong, _The Seven Who Fled_ follows (naturally) seven characters with different backgrounds who start out together but are scattered by political upheaval and try to escape from central Asia. Following seven characters allows Prokosch to more fully explore the human condition -- the different ways people react to the unfamiliar and to danger, the different fates that result either from their decisions or simple bad luck -- than he could with one, though of course he sacrifices some dramatic unity in the process.

The seven characters are of different nationalities, genders, belief systems, etc. But rather than -- as with many books of that era and ours -- the characters becoming representative types, a thinly disguised way for the author to generalize about their respective categories, what comes through is a broader sense of the inadequacy of any one narrow viewpoint. We may like or dislike certain of the characters, but they hold our interest because of their common humanity -- and, at times, their inhumanity.

I have no desire to spoil the outcome of the novel for any who can find it, since it is currently out of print. But I would hold up certain scenes for comparison with any written in the 20th century. For example, one of the characters freezes to death, and the chapter which his progress slows and stops and his mind drifts to the home he will never see again is masterly, indeed quite superior to any similar scene written by Jack London.

Prokosch would turn to the far east again in his fiction -- _The Dark Dancer_, set in medieval India, is quite good -- but these first two novels are arguably his best until _The Missolonghi Manuscript_, a faux-memoir of Byron's last days in Greece. Perhaps it is the stoic aspects of eastern philosophy and religion that drew him, for the sensibility in his novels is very nearly Buddhist in its overall detachment while remaining Romantic in its particulars. Whatever it was, the world he has imagined will likely strike you so powerfully that you will choose to return more than once.

In a recent interview, the amazing writer Harlan Ellison says this, and his word is good enough for me:

"My favorite book in the world is The Seven Who Fled, by Frederic Prokosch. You can get one off Amazon in any number of editions.

"It's a novel about seven people fleeing a Chinese warlord across the Gobi desert.

"And there is one section near the beginning, in a chapter called "Layeville," who is one of the characters, where he describes the desert.

"And it is the most mesmerizing writing I have ever read. And there is a flow to it, because Prokosch was also a poet. And this was the Harper Prize novel, I think in 1933, or '34, something like that.

"And it was not his first novel--his first novel was The Asiatics--but it was his second. And for someone that young to write that brilliantly sets a mountaintop for people such as I to aspire to.

"And you cannot--I will take that book with me when I do writers' workshops, and I will read them just that one section. It's not much, it's about a page.

"And I say, "When you can write like that, then I will bow down and I will kiss the hem of your garment." So."