FROM EMPTY HARBOUR TO WHITE OCEAN

Llywelyn's 1994 novel, which won that year's National Eisteddfod of Wales Prose Medal, relates in irrelevantly gorgeous and sensuous sentences the Kafkaesque journey undertaken by protagonist Gregor Marini, a wanderer who stows away on a ship that takes him to an unidentified country (presumably Wales). What's suggested is that Gregor is fleeing an unhappy past, as he's hired by a Borges-like library to work as ""Under-Cataloguer, Department of Mythology,"" then promoted to ""Recorder of Fables"" and sent to a remote ""north country"" where, we infer, his experiences parallel ones that will be familiar to connoisseurs of Welsh legend and myth. It's all quite pleasingly written, though we get little interpretive help from the phlegmatic Gregor, who doesn't travel very well. Neither, alas, does this novel.