Apostasy Now
Stone, Robert
Apostasy Now A FLAG FOR SUNRISE by Robert Stone Alfred A. Knopf. 439 pp. $13.95. The power, clarity, and sharpness of Robert Stone's prose already have earned him a place of importance for a...
...You have to sink a damn long way before you get to me...
...A Flag for Sunrise is a fine novel...
...Holliwell, caught between his love for Sister Justin and his fear of torture at the hands of the Tecan Guardia, compromises his love for the benefit of his life...
...The novel moves through the permutations in the lives of its characters with Stone's celebrated felicity and ferocity...
...Stone's style gathers both speed and ease as, ironically, his characters descend as far from grace as can be imagined...
...The power, clarity, and sharpness of Robert Stone's prose already have earned him a place of importance for a generation not so much lost as cast out...
...Stone should deal with what is born, and not what -is dead...
...Stone is troubled by what might be called an absence of motive...
...While Holliwell is moving to what obviously seduces him, Stone presents the characters of Pablo Tabor, a speed freak of considerable desperation who signs on with the Callahans, a charming American couple whose purpose is to smuggle arms to Tecan insurgents—not for the solidarity but for the currency...
...he construes his duty as the development of "awareness"—that is, the observance without intervention of child murder, torture, and other objectionable acts...
...I ask the question not to create a rating game but to determine why Stone has pushed his talents toward an obsessive and utterly moot task, the explication of the mysterious ways of God to man...
...Stone would do well to throw away his Bible and catechism and allusions and the compulsive, time-wasting trappings of Catholic soul-searching...
...When you do, I'm waiting...
...A reader might expect more fire in the message in A Flag for Sunrise...
...everyone becomes a pilgrim or a demon...
...Faced with the dilemma of what ought to be done to assuage misery, Stone's characters consistently shun the political...
...One gathers Stone has sympathy for the revolution, but, like most American writers, he cannot discard bourgeois skepticism and face the need for what the revolution requires...
...Holliwell is in despair...
...His is the language of Those Who Know but find no comfort...
...Instead, Stone retreats into religious symbolism...
...Father Egan is in charge...
...Vietnam, the hazy avatar of Tecan, forces up the question of Stone's choice of analysis in A Flag for Sunrise...
...That is the sort of writing—tough, biting, and achingly wry—that keeps Stone's work going even in the face of larger troubles...
...Tecan is a Yankee pocket dictatorship, and revolution is imminent...
...After a while the correspondence becomes a problem...
...He drinks too much, moves through life dumbstruck by something he has witnessed but cannot comprehend...
...Characters who face that need, such as Sister Justin, meet terrible, nightmarish ends...
...One of his potential tormentors says: "You see, I'm the wrath of God in my tiny ways...
...for this reason he is revered among certain cabals of the alienated and distrusted by wide swaths of the comfortable and the fortunate...
...Leave that to Graham Greene...
...Those afflicted find me...
...Why, then, does Stone's third novel seem so clearly outranked by his previous books, A Hall of Mirrors and Dog Soldiers...
...This is a characteristic weakness of a generation, something Stone dissected nicely in Dog Soldiers...
...He is co-winner of the 1981 Bryant Spann Prize for journalism, awarded by the Eugene V. Debs Foundation...
...I don't go seeking out the misguided and the perverse, not at all...
...Enter Frank Holliwell, an American anthropologist who performed one or two tasks for the CIA while he was in Vietnam...
...A man has nothing to fear," Holliwell concludes, "who understands history...
...Rod Davis (Rod Davis, former editor of The Texas Observer, teaches English at the University of Texas and is at work on a novel...
...In A Flag for Sunrise, Stone offers several characters whose fortunes intertwine in the fictitious Central American country of Tecan, the kind of place against which one might favorably compare Paraguay...
...In Tecan, waiting for the bad blood and the revolution to congeal, is a failing Catholic mission of the Devotionist order...
...The combination leads her to collaboration with the Tecan insurgents, who intend to use the Devotionist mission as an aid station in an upcoming offensive...
...In beginning a criticism of it, this should be made clear: One only need compare it to, say, Tad Szulc's Diplomatic Immunity, which also takes as its subject these revolutionary times in Latin America, to appreciate the difference between serious writing and commercial word-assemblage...
...The reasoning seems to be that all political systems create their own problems, which comes down to saying that we can expect no salvation on this Earth...
...Stone is capable, as is Frank Holliwell, of looking evil in the eye and seeing that the eye is blue and looking back...
...He buys a pitch from a CIA friend to visit Tecan for scholarly purposes, as well as for discreet inquiries about the nature of what is happening in-country...
...A Flag for Sunrise demonstrates that Stone's wild, panic-inspired humor, his acquaintance with evil, and his feel for narrative pace are intact...
...I'm the shark on the bottom of the lagoon...
...An otherwise tough book becomes an instrument for Stone's working out of what is really nothing more than a specialized religious conceit...
...Sister Justin Feeney, Father Egan's assistant, is a purist and a nurse...
...Stone is an expert in the use of obliqueness, understatement, and hard-forged syllogism, all of which have the effect of capturing the sense of the inchoate which even now hangs so thickly over this country's most vulnerable generation, that of Vietnam...
...Holliwell, observing the revolution about him, also quotes Yeats, "A terrible beauty is born...
...Those who extricate themselves from involvement, such as Holliwell, or maintain a cancerous distance, such as Father Egan, survive...
...Robert Stone keeps sending us letters on the road to hell...
...Stone is a chronicler of mortality as surely as were Milton and Keats, but his vision is distorted by our own times, and through our own accoutrements: drugs, automatic weapons, distilled beverages, wanton and ceaseless acts of sophisticated brutality...
...It serves no purpose after that to fantasize and speculate as to whether He Who Made the Blue Eye made thee...
Vol. 46 • May 1982 • No. 5
