"Africa! Africa! Good God!"

STORM AND ECHO (274 pp.)--Frederic Prokosch--Doubleday ($3).

In 1935, a young Yale professor had an immediate success with a first novel, The Asiatics. Frederic Prokosch had written a story so flamboyantly adventurous and so rich in pure writing talent that to carp at its philosophical maunderings seemed petty. Wrote Nobel Prizewinner Thomas Mann: "I count it among the most brilliant and original achievements of the young literary generation." The trouble is that Prokosch has gone on writing variants of the same book for 13 years. His latest is Storm and Echo, like The Asiatics, a blend of far places, strange and terrible events, and a murky, anguished, generally unsuccessful search for the meaning of life.

Into the heart of the Congo plunge four white men in search of legendary Mt. Nagala. All four men are searching for something: Samuel for a brilliant friend who once started for Nagala and was never heard from again; Marius, the mineralogist, for rare metals; Joshua, the entomologist, for rare insects; Alessandro, the anthropologist, for "secret gods."

But no Prokosch character is ever really motivated by goals so easily stated. It is Marius who blows his top one night and rips down the facade of their pretenses: "We've all been lying. Cheating. Masquerading . . . What is it we're really after? . . . One wants peace. Another wants love. A third wants faith. A fourth wants power. It's all very simple. And rather absurd."

Just how absurd it all is readers of Storm and Echo will discover. Of his earlier gifts, Prokosch still retains a descriptive talent that can make the heat, the stench, and the occasional beauty of the African jungle almost tangible. Stripped of its pretentious symbolism, its agonized soul-searching, this could have been a good travel book. But the vivid jungle is matted and twined with the perilous Africa cliche, reminiscent of Hollywood's stock treatment: "Well," he muttered, staring up at the constellations, "don't go too deep into Africa. Don't try to grasp her. Don't try to penetrate her. Don't get sucked into the whirlpool. The deeper you go, the more poisonous she grows. Take my word for it. You'll end by going mad . . ." Storm and Echo will give many readers the same wrung-out feeling they'd get from seeing a dozen performances of White Cargo.

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