Word: prokosch
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...DOOMED OASIS, by Hammond Innes (314 pp.; Knopf; $3.95), is a stouthearted attempt to win back the desert from the venery-in-Araby school-Paul Bowles and Frederic Prokosch-and return it to the unperfumed condition described by that old camel trammeler, Foreign Legion Novelist Percival Christopher (Beau Geste) Wren. The Legion defends no forts in this tale, but there is an outfit called the Trucial Oman Scouts and there is, as a matter of fact, a defended fort. There is also some rousing prose, not all of it defensible. The book opens with: "Call Aubrey George Grant! The moment...
...Prokosch's style has lost none of its meticulous, almost antiseptic clarity in this story of renaissance Italy, but neither does it seem to have progressed. He has plucked from the history of the world a rather unsavory incident of parricide, researched it thoroughly, and reported it with exactness. The names of the past receive flesh and clothing, and the words they spoke or probably spoke are worked into vernacular and decorated with quotation marks. Aside from this, the author does little more than fill out the recorded incidents with stage direction and plausible detail, and fill in between them...
This end, like all of the tale, is grim. There is almost no change of tone and no relief in the story, and in this certainly lies much of its oppressiveness. "Our tale begins in darkness and ends in darkness," Prokosch begins, and he pursues the sordid, the unhealthy, and the cruel throughout the book with what appears to be a devotion to some mistaken ideal of honesty. The only other explanation of his over-frequent descriptions of torture and disease would be an intent to please or attract readers through their sheer sadism...
...last, and perhaps the richest opportunity offered by the retelling of history is that of exploring and trying to uncover the characters of persons whose names have been only that. Here too, Prokosch has fallen far short of what might have been done. We see his figures and hear them, but on the few occasions we are allowed into any of their minds it is only to see briefly what runs on the surface of their thought...
...Tale for Midnight recounts the history of a crime, and does it well. Beyond this it can claim little distinction. Frederic Prokosch is a good craftsman with words in their immediacy, but only that. His book as a whole lacks vitality and meaning...