A Rag For Sunrise

...For Conrad, Greene, and LeCarre can be considered the elegists of Britain's dreams of empire and the explorers of that vaster, richer territorv of the spirit that lies beyond the hope of triumph over history...

...His one assistant at the mission is Sister Justin Feeney, a young woman torn by her sexuality and her religious commitment, and drawn closer and closer to the idea of the revolution as the only truly efficient realization of her vow of service: a less secure Joan of Arc, if you wish...

...Comforting to think of it as some aberration, a perversion of nature...

...But, on a lecture junket to the country bordering Tecan, he is requested by a CIA friend to investigate the rumors of a possible revolution in Tecan...

...But in this post-Vietnam, post-Watergate, post-Vatican II, mid-Reagan novel, it is quite as much reassurance as we are entitled to...

...We are all, these stories tell us, subversives and secret agents...

...The thing itself.'' A mystic, an activist, an intellectual ironist, and a narcissist: these are the four personalities, or the four sides of a single personality, whose adventures, tensions, and interchanges Stone's novel explores...

...But it was the real thing, he thought...

...He is also, between bouts of drunkenness, at work on a long book of theological speculation designed, apparently, to reconcile modern man to universal doubt by a synthesis of Christian, Oriental, and Gnostic beliefs: a shabby Teilhard, in other words, possessed by visions both muddled and moving...

...We know the joke that is the last two decades and more of American life, we know (don't you...

...The fourth major character of A Flag for Sunrise is Pablo Tabor...

...As an aging Central American revolutionary puts it, near the center of the book, "Compadre, we are all vulgarizations of history...

...what the abridgement of hope is all about, how insidiously The Thing Itself encroaches upon and cheapens our expectations...

...Father Egan, an alcoholic and latent homosexual, is in charge of a failed mission, about to be closed down, in Tecan...

...Stone is careful to keep the four major characters as far apart from one another as possible until their inevitable meeting in the last quarter of the book, so that when the meeting finally does occur, it has all the force and logic of a tragic catastrophe...

...It is a parable: not of innocence and experience, but more seriously of innocence-and-experience and the brutal facts of history that defeat both those idealisms...

...For, besides being a novel of power and depth, this is also a thriller of the first order...

...It is a familiar theme in twentieth century fiction, evoking associations with the work of Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, and John LeCarre...

...Holliwell thinks to himself near the end of the book...

...And A Flag for Sunrise, Robert Stone's new novel, grasps so desperately at nihilism that the reader feels an exuberance, even maybe an optimism, in the very ferocity of its despair...

...And I know of no higher praise for Stone's book than to say that it is worthy of such associations...

...It begins with the discovery of the corpse of a murdered American girl stuffed into a freezer...

...Frank Holliwell, on the other hand, is neither mystic nor incipient activist...

...Reluctantly, he does...

...This is a novel, in other words, about the killing tension between politics and the religious sensibility...

...Completing the quaternity of idealisms which the novel explores, he is the sheer incarnation of the self as hunger, as the desire to survive and dominate regardless of the cost to others...

...And past all our nihilism, irony, selfishness, and mysticism lies the possibility of something that can transfigure those vices into the stuff of possibility...

...And if it can be associated with the novels of Conrad, Greene, and LeCarre, that in I itself is news, and an indication of a new trend in the American sensibility...

...As Holliwell reflects about him during their climactic encounter, Pablo's insane selfishness "glistened in a billion pairs of eyes...

...Mad and murderous, he is of all the characters in the novel the closest to the central horror of existence without meaning...

...The four Americans do not all meet until the last quarter of the book, when the revolution - the brutal fact itself - has begun...

...double agents, emissaries from some kingdom of meaning cast adrift and alone, without reliable contacts, in lands of chaos and uncertainty...

...organized book lies in Lichtenstein's definition of "macha": Let's start by saying she makes things tough for herself, and then deliberately makes them tougher...

...You have to read rather carefully, in fact, to decide if the revolution in Tecan succeeds or fails...

...Pablo is pure, selfish need and appetite...

...Robert Stone is the first American writer I know of who shares that melancholy, that maturity, and that bitter sanity...

...He is an intellectual, a drunken burn-out, a professor of anthropology who has done work for the American Intelligence Community in Vietnam and been permanently, bitterly disillusioned by that obscene war about the chances for morality in politics...

...Like most seductions, it turns out disastrously...

...But the central, uncontrollable, rich vulgarity of life - what Lord Byron called "the thing itself" - disturbs and frightens us, so we run to "sound philosophy," to elegant formulations of absolute salvation or absolute damnation...

...That, at any rate, seems to be the informing vision of A Flag for Sunrise: man is by nature a Gnostic, and reality is by nature intolerant of Gnosticism...

...and finds himself once more seduced into hope...

...And the more fiercely we embrace them, the more tantalizingly they elude our grasp...

...Know the one about the Demiurge and the Abridgement of Hope...

...Indeed, in the tradition in which Stone works, the tradition of Conrad, Greene, and LeCarre, the concepts of "metaphysics" and "thriller" are virtually indistinguishable...

...Shelley, in The Triumph of Life, asks "why God made irreconcilable/Good and the means of good.'' It might be the epigraph for Holliwell's life...

...and it ends with a dehydrated American castaway trying, pathetically, to enlist the help of a passing tourist boat...

...It can be observed, though, that the story is not only conceived, but told beautifully...

...And still we believe in sunrise, still we try to find a love that will last in this world, that will unify the mystic, the revolutionary, the intellectual, and the hungry, mute self each of us carries within...

...one might always find oneself backsliding into hope...

...The action is set in the mythic Central American country of Tecan, where a populist revolution is aborning...

...Think about that opening and closing image: Americans victimized, but (as the book will insist) Americans victimized by their own adventurism, Americans in all their optimism and cynicism trapped in the web of their immitigable innocence (for cynicism, as well as optimism, is a kind of innocence...

...A Coast Guard deserter and a half-crazed, violent speed freak, Pablo is hired by a cheerfully amoral set of gun runners, the Cal-lahans, to accompany them as they make their delivery of weapons to the Tecan revolutionaries...

...And that is as it should be, for this is not really a novel about historical change, but about the ways we react to historical change: and about the ways we can free ourselves from our bondage to change...

...Think of the title itself: the book is about the chances for sunrise...

...And, just as murders and other acts of violence in Greek tragedy were always assumed to occur offstage, so does the revolution in A Flag for Sunrise recede into the background of the story as the story itself progresses...

...Between those two grisly scenes lies a succession of adventures, betrayals, embarrassments, and seductions - all presented in what must be one of the most convincing, and most baroque, of contemporary narrative styles...

...spies trying to decipher the hidden code of our own lives...

...And if his novel is fierce in its despair, it is even fiercer in its unvoiced suggestion of a sensibility that renders despair itself mute before the absurd, unending possibility of love...

...it is, rather, on the experiences of four North Americans - idealists all, in their various ways - caught up in this minor whirlpool in the flood of history...

...It is not the most reassuring of beliefs...

...A Flag for Sunrise is an important political novel precisely because it is such a perceptive religious novel...

...And the middle ground between those hateful contraries is the blood battleground of human history...

...We have to live it out day by day - life, unlike sound philosophy, is vulgar...

...She flies...

...But the focus is not on the process of revolution itself, nor on the personalities or culture of the Tecanecans...

...For if it is a book of ferocious nihilism, a post-Vietnam novel, A Flag for Sunrise is also a book that entertains one, slim, vulnerable, but nevertheless compelling hope...

...And it would be a disservice to the reader to reveal how that conflict turns out...

...She jumps at the chance to climb Annapurna . . . She picks up the check at lunch with a male companion in an expensive restaurant and flashes a gold American Express card to pay for it...

...Well, of course, we do...