NOBODY ON THE ROAD: A Mission of Death into an Unknown Country

A cryptofable in which the King of a placeless and nameless country has taken refuge in England. There are characters, including the narrator, without names; others like Kaput or Kallouris begin with K which is as far as one wants to go in making the obligatory referral. The narrator then is part of a Committee of Liberation marching on through a politically and geographically chimerical landscape to reach a monastery whose Superior, having exchanged the conflicts of the world for the more difficult struggles of the spirit, will ultimately confront the Mediator. Is the Superior going to kill the Mediator? Will the Mediator be able to prevent the final (and almost only) burst of action in which the partisans, all save the narrator, will be killed? Rose writes discreetly and well with occasional irony--""If the Superior said, 'Bury this man in the turnip field,' would they think it just another of God's little odd jobs?"" And there's a nice tailpiece to take the chill off what is essentially an abstraction for all times, depersonalized rather than difficult to read either literally or ideologically. After all this territory is not is not too unknown--nobody wins on the road to war.