Alone and on the Run

By John Skow

TITLE: TO THE WHITE SEA

AUTHOR: JAMES DICKEY

PUBLISHER: HOUGHTON MIFFLIN; 275 PAGES; $22.95

THE BOTTOM LINE: An airman's hopeless, exultant flight from civilization is told in a poet's charged language.

There is a strange airlessness to this brooding, mannered tale -- part adventure story, part death chant -- of a downed U.S. airman's run to avoid capture, across the length of World War II Japan. The mood is intentional; author James Dickey, whose day job is writing and teaching poetry (and who wrote the hugely successful novel Deliverance), does not make mistakes with words. Quite deliberately, he has created a hero, a tail gunner named Muldrow, who by birth and choice has been isolated from human society. Muldrow was raised in the Alaskan bush. He got along well enough with his father when necessary, but preferred the wild prey and predators of the mountains to people, and in truth was most at home with no other life on the great, empty snowfields and shelved ocean ice.

Dickey takes such a man, no one's friend or enemy, a solitary legend with seven gunnery kills to his credit, and isolates him still further. Muldrow's bomber is shot down over Tokyo, and he parachutes safely into the city's dock area, where he hides. He decides to try to reach the frigid, unpopulous island of Hokkaido, several hundred miles to the north. There is no realistic prospect of getting there, or of surviving if he manages it. But when an air raid starts a fire storm, he kills one man for clothes and another for shoes, < smears soot on his face, and starts out.

So author and character are exactly where they want to be: alone, on the run, in danger. Dickey's danger is considerable: he chooses to tell the story as a first-person meditation by a powerfully intuitive man whose nature has made him almost wordless. He gives Muldrow a risky interior narrative style that is both mystical and deliberately awkward. The peril is that this will sound like a winning entry in the Bad Hemingway contest. Sometimes it's close, as when Muldrow describes terraced farms in moonlight: "I was up on the levels, big levels, the levels of the world, like they were in that place. That place, and not any other place. They were the levels, there in the moon; they were the only levels. That's where I was . . ." But by brute force of talent Dickey makes the reader accept that yes, Muldrow might actually think this way. Language is not the book's problem.

What is the problem, and a crippling one, is that it is not just Muldrow who has turned his face away from humanity; this is a novel carefully planned to exclude all human contact. Dickey has his character kill several people on his way north, doing it efficiently and without hatred or regret, like a hunter killing rabbits. The structure of the novel justifies this, of course; these are enemies. And Muldrow is an impressive creation, a primitive marvel. But he is incomplete, not fully human. In society he would be a sociopath; out of it, for all his interior monologue, he is simply a doomed predator. And whether Dickey is aware of his hero's limitation is not at all clear.