Prague is a historical novel by Arthur Phillips about a group of North American expatriates in Budapest, Hungary circa 1990, at the end of the cold war.

Main Characters

• John Price is the protagonist of the novel, a 24-year-old who comes to Budapest to find his brother, with whom he has had a strained relationship. A dreamer throughout the story, he constantly suspects that "life" is better, more authentic, somewhere else. He finds a job with the upstart newspaper, BudapesToday. Both John and Scott Price are Jewish and from the west coast.

• Scott Price is John's brother; his grudge against John does not abate. To escape him, he leaves for Romania with his wife, Maria. A jock alpha male with a decidedly un-alpha childhood (he was overweight and often picked-upon), he experiences regular lapses of insecurity, blaming his brother for his unpleasant childhood. For his living, he teaches English.

• Emily Oliver is an embassy worker, originally from Nebraska. The details of her work are not known to the other characters (she works in a classified environment). She often feels unfulfilled by her work and suspects, herself, that she is living in the shadow of her father, with a distinguished foreign service career.

• Mark Payton is a gay Canadian academic who researches nostalgia. As his time in Budapest progresses, he becomes unable to separate his life from his work (which the other characters view as charmingly irrelevant) and is eventually forced to leave for mental health reasons.

• Charles Gabor is a junior member of a risk-averse venture capital firm in the United States. Of Hungarian ancestry (his parents escaped during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution) he came to Budapest hoping to earn a fortune, but his lethargic firm refuses all of his proposals. Eventually, he grows bitter, suspecting that all of Hungary's entrepreneurial spirits have been drained by four decades of Communism.

• Karen Whitley is John Price's officemate, described by Nicky M. as "the office airhead", and the woman to whom John Price loses his virginity.

• Nicky M, whose last name is never given, is John Price's artist girlfriend who, while affectionate toward him, is also inerrantly selfish. While allowing sexual relations to flow freely, she refuses, comically, to give him any emotional support.

• Maria is Scott Price's fiance and, later, wife, of Hungarian ancestry. Despite her evident affection for Scott, she sleeps with John at one point in the novel.

• Nadja is an elderly Hungarian piano player. A cosmopolite with dazzling stories, she becomes a close friend of John throughout the novel, and he even experiences a bizarre sexual attraction to her, wishing she were younger so that he could be featured in her romantic stories. Of the characters who meet her, only John actually believes her unlikely stories, but the question of their veracity is never settled.

• Imre Horvath is the heir to a once-profitable Hungarian publishing house, with two centuries of tradition. Having escaped Hungary in 1956, he set up a new publishing house in Vienna during the Soviet occupation, and the old publishing-house, state-owned, falls into ruin. In 1990, he approaches Charles Gabor hoping to accrue venture capital and re-start the operation. By the other characters, he is viewed as a silly, self-important old man.

• Krisztina Toldy is Mr. Horvath's devoted assistant.

Setting

Prague is set in Budapest, Hungary, following the cold war. Only John Price, at the end of the novel, spends any appreciable time in the actual city of Prague. Rather, Prague represents the unfulfilled emotional desires of the novel's main characters; it is the city where-- as the novel's characters perceive-- there is more life, capital flows more freely, and there are better parties, than in Budapest.

Each of Prague 's main characters comes to the city with a different motive. For Mark Payton, Budapest is an opportunity for field research in his study of historical nostalgia; he views his native city of Toronto as bland and lacking history. Emily desires to emulate her father's acclaimed foreign service career by working in the United States embassy. Scott Price seeks to escape his miserable childhood in the United States, while John Price (whom Scott sees as a source of said misery) desires reconciliation. Finally, Charles Gabor's goal is to make a fortune as a venture capitalist in the emerging, new Budapest.

Hungarian history is prominently featured in Prague, emerging via the novel's major Hungarian characters, particularly Nadja. About one-fifth of the novel deals exclusively with the history of the Horvath family's publishing house-- through Hapsburg rule, an 1848 revolution, a pre-World War I "golden age" (characterized, despite its charms, by cultural squabblings and anti-Semitism), then decades of turmoil through the World Wars and Soviet occupation.

Much of the historical detail furnished by Phillips is actually outside the purview or interest of the major characters (excluding Mark) but is given for the reader's benefit, adding historical context to events of the novel.

Plot

Prague opens on the afternoon of May 25, 1990 with the five central expatriates playing a game of "Sincerity", a game whose object is to detect the other participants' lies, and to evade the detection of one's own lies. Scoring zero points and therefore the worst liar is Emily Oliver, and this perceived innocence is John's reason for falling in love with her.

The novel opens in Budapest's high summer, and its characters are, for the most part, optimistic about their prospects in the Central European city. John Price, an aspiring writer, secures a poorly-paid but influential position as a columnist for the paper, BudapesToday, and plots to win Emily's admiration. Mark Payton relishes his attempt to be immersed in a place with interesting history. Only Charles, whose resentment for his co-workers and VC firm are evident from the start, is pessimistic at the story's outset.

In July, John, at age 24, loses his virginity to officemate Karen Whitley, and finds the experience to be quite anticlimactic-- he had avoided sex as evil until then; afterward, he found the act both harmless and emotionally meaningless. (I'll finish this later, or someone else can.)