Book Description

TRAVELS OF THE PRINCE is a narrative poem divided into five parts or Provenances. It is a fictionalized yet to some extent, parallel history told as a mythic tale, but with shadowy references to historical times, places, and events. The first part, "The Provenance of Darkness" is a kind of prehistory, the second suggests the Orient, the third, Greece, the forth, Rome, the fifth, the Modern Era. The principal characters, Prince Krishna, his friend, Baladev, (referred to as Dog, Sun, Weird), his enemy, Kaliya, (refered to as Snake, Python, Dissident) live in a timeless world in which events occur in a somewhat circular rather than linear way. The story begins when Prince Krishna, son of the Great Khan ruler of the Seven Realms that constitute the Empire, leaves his father's castle and against his father's wishes, begins a long adventurous journey from one realm to the next. This apparently rebellious action of the Prince, inspires Kaliya, the messianic leader of the autochthonous peoples, to rebel against the Empire and attack Baladev, Commander of the Imperial Army. New characters now appear, the Lords of the Seven Realms: Hiranyaksha of the Golden Eye, "the jewel-flashing dandy", Lord of the Second Realm, Kaliya's man; Phoibos Iskander, Duke of the Third realm, "a boy well made and fatal"; Arjuna Beak-o'-Bronze, Duke of the Fourth Realm; Narada "of the unhappy Consciousness, Lord of the Fifth Realm; Orlando, the Alchemist, Lord of the Sixth Realm; Hyperion, Lord of the Seventh Realm, "Held a secret so intense that no one dared to covet it". The almost continuous war that ensues between Kaliya and Baladev is destined to involve all of the Seven Realms as first one side, then the other appear to be the victor, each side hoping to enlist the sympathies of the Prince. Whereas the Khan is an enlightened monarch with democratic ideals, Kaliya's followers are of a static society, still mired in the past. On another level the war could be regarded as more a symbolic conflict between the mind-set of antiquity and the enduring quest of the individual for freedom of the creative spirit. The Prince, who has attachments for both Baladev and Kaliya, wavers between their opposing points of view. In the end, however, events bring him back, though under cloudy circumstances, to his father's castle at the place called Worldsend.