A FLAG FOR SUNRISE

Four Americans converge on a Central-American banana dictatorship called Tecan—and each of them is clearly ready for some internal shake-up. Frank Holliwell, an anthropologist suffering from anomie, has been invited down by the Tecan national university to give a lecture—and he's also been asked to do some snooping around by CIA buddies he'd known from Vietnam days. Pablo Tabor, a young paranoid speed-freak Coast-Guard deserter, has signed on aboard a gun-running boat set to deliver arms to Tecan rebels. Sister Justin Feeney, a young Devotionist nun, is about to be pulled from her Tecan coast dispensary by her order (she's a supporter of the rebels). And Father Egan, Justin's co-missionary, is a priest who's steadily more pickled with brandy and visions of the Demiurge and the Pleroma. These, four, in fact—the intellectual wimp adrift in history, the bad-news outcast, the tragically strong woman, the released-of-it-all gnostic—are pretty much the usual cast of a Stone novel (A Hall of Mirrors, Dog Soldiers): four compass points that themselves stagger under generally vicious circumstances. Stone's hallmark—scenes of menace—is on lavish display here too: corpses in freezers; a woman threatened with a gun at her head while frozen burgers are arranged around her supine body; at least three shipboard murders. And the violence seems very right, made inevitable by the tone of dark historical despair underlying everything. But whereas A Hall of Mirrors and, even more, Dog Soldiers spiked toward catharsis (novels as plotted as Stone's surely seem to demand one), here the fever-break is absent—with oddly ill-timed, often premature climaxes which make us feel like we're guttering instead of steadily climbing. True, there's no shortage of dramatic movements here: Holliwell and Sister Justin have a brief and mutually-embarrassing amour; there are truly awful murders, torture, a failed revolt, an exhaustion of motive. But the working-out of the story finally seems not much more cutting (only more hard-boiled) than the vector in a book like The Bridge at San Luis Rey (fate—and cynicism—bringing people together only to destroy them); and whole sections are fumbly, purple at times, contrived enough even to resort to an eavesdropping scene. And yet, all that said, this is also the work of a truly powerful, unduplicated voice. No American writer does crazy dangerous people better—perhaps because no American novelist finds the strain of pusillanimity in contemporary Americans quite as scary as Stone does: "Pablo took himself out on deck again, the anticipated clean clothes he carried were just a useless embarrassment now. He was nearly enraged. It was a hell of a thing not to get a shower when you wanted one. It was a bring-down. It made you negative." And, more agonized than even a Naipaul over history's black holes, Stone lights every page with the superiority of his prose: the great descending speed of his paragraphs, hipness turning ecclesiastical, the extraordinary cynical ventriloquisms of much of the dialogue. Writing on this sure a ad powerful level is not to be ignored—even when its container, as here, seems poorly weighted and subject to leaks.