Thriller with a Moral

MISSING (249 pp.)--Egon Hostovsky --Viking ($3).

It is the eve of the Communist coup of 1948, and Paul Kral, journalist, wants to leave Czechoslovakia. His object is entirely personal: to visit an ailing friend in the U.S. The Communists in the Ministry of the Interior, more interested in politics than in friendship, cannot decide whether to let him go. For that matter, the U.S. consulate is puzzled over whether he ought to be allowed a visa.

Kral, says Moscow-trained Bureaucrat Matejka, is "a typical bourgeois liberal with leanings toward anarchism." Actually, what troubles Matejka is that Kral is not at all typical: he belongs to no party, spouts no doctrine, and (something that also troubles the U.S. consulate) includes men of all beliefs among his friends. The hero of Missing never appears in its pages. But, like an invisible magnet, Paul Kral draws its characters into his orbit, strengthening their humanity by his example of personal goodness.

A wavering Communist assigned to investigate Kral quits the party. A liberal newspaperman, fortified by Kral's friendship, gains courage to become an underground agent for democracy. A Roman Catholic priest goes to prison, braced by the thought of Kral. In short, though Krai is never seen doing or saying anything (and is never explicitly granted or denied a passport), he becomes a symbol transcending ideologies.

Neither saint nor leader, Kral, as the priest says, is "a volunteer in the service of Love." Such a man, merely by being alive, becomes an intolerable challenge to the totalitarian state.

Author Egon Hostovsky knows his Czechoslovakia. A veteran of the Czech diplomatic service and a friend of Jan Masaryk, he quit his post as attache in Oslo after the Red coup and now lives in the U.S. Missing is an unusually smooth blend of thriller and moral tale. And page after page, despite a plot that often seems unduly complex, Hostovsky gives a thoroughly convincing picture of a country drifting into Moscow's grip.

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