In his eighth novel, novelist Robert Stone
revisits familiar ground via similar characters, themes
and settings. As with protagonists from earlier novels,
Michael Ahearn, a teacher at a small Midwestern college,
is a dissatisfied academic—a half-man, compartmentalized
and walled off from hope, sliding into alcoholism and infidelity
as he enters middle-age. To some extent he has had success
in building a fragile, but comfortable world. Both he and
his wife Kristin (a Chaucer expert) have their college jobs,
a son, a house, and a dog.
Indeed, Ahearn has kept his life in a rough
balance, though he does have an eye for the ladies and a
taste for whiskey. However, as in all Stone novels, clouds
are gathering on the horizon. In the novel's first
pages, one senses a growing tension in the Ahearn household.
The turn of the wheel begins when Michael and a couple of
teacher buddies head out to go deer hunting. The hunting
trip has its previously established ritual, with Michael
insisting upon stopping at a hole-in-the-wall diner for
a special unblended Irish whiskey. This little necessity
illustrates clearly how Michael has spent his life encased
in empty traditions and conducting tame suburban rituals.
At the diner, Michael safely slums a bit
with the locals. Still, there is an edge, a blending of
the real and surreal in this nowhere bar. Michael, while
chatting up Megan, a young and hard barmaid, feels a faint
brush of danger as he is mocked by others at the bar—though
it is a brush he apparently enjoys. As Megan turns away
to get his whiskey, he notices the forked tongue of a snake
tattooed on the nape of her neck. It's a warning and
signal of a darker world—its near boundaries. The
coming danger is further reinforced by an incident in the
woods. As Michael sits in his tree stand, he witnesses another
hunter trying to move a deer's carcass through the
underbrush with a wheel barrel. It's a grotesque scene,
like something out of a Hieronymous Bosch painting, which
will later mutate into a more grotesque tableau before the
novel's end. To some extent the entire hunting portion
of the novel, with all its establishment of fateful symbols
and patterns—right down to a dropped flashlight—contains
some of the best writing in the book.
A phone call soon shatters the backwoods
reverie of the teacher-hunters. Paul, Michael and Kristin's
son, nearly dies in an accident. Though the boy lives, the
cracks that were in Michael's world suddenly expand.
Unlike Kristin, he has no faith to turn to. His has led
an entirely superficial existence, right down to his church
attendance, with its reliance on comforting and familiar
traditions and rituals, but for him, without the spiritual
underpinnings. It is a vague and unanchored need that dominates
Michael's world. Additionally, an apparently indifferent
God has nearly allowed his son to die. His drinking increases,
and the friction with his wife begins to grow to an unbridgeable
distance. Finally, enter Lara, a fellow teacher, who is
a new and exotic addition to his life.
Lara is a complex figure. She's a femme
fatale with killer looks and amoral sexual appetites, who
is rumored to have slept with Castro and to have known Graham
Greene. She's a shadowy figure with shadowy ties—through
family and a previous marriage—to the intelligence community.
Right-wing, left-wing, it's an ever-shifting cynical prism
—the spy game's "Hall of Mirrors"—that the reader
shouldn't even try to penetrate in hopes of understanding.
However, Lara can also be fragile, even frantic. At times,
this character's complexity breaks down into confusingly
mixed signals. Which Lara is real? The fact that she reflects,
just as disjointedly, the world and its intrigues perhaps
provides an answer, though it leaves the reader with an
ever-shifting symbol-of-the-moment more than a flesh and
blood character.
Upon meeting Michael, there is a witty,
allusive repartee between the two. Lara launches zingers
about Michael's Norman Rockwell family, and Michael counters
with his Anna Karenina response—and invitation— "Happy
families are all alike." At this level, Lara works
best. The affair begins and Michael is hardly subtle as
he skates closer to the edge with Lara. He drinks more and
stays out to all hours of the night, while neglecting the
needs and company of his family. A price quickly begins
to accrue.
Kristin isn't dumb. Though the accident
with Paul now has her immersed in an upscale Bible study,
she nevertheless remains suspicious of her husband. Paul
is also picking up on changes in Dad and starts to act out.
But Michael is in too deep now. There are rough sexual games,
guns, and some mean racquetball. However, the recent death
of a brother forces Lara to revisit her past, which is on
an island near Haiti. This memory triggers Lara's
disintegration. It seems her brother, on his island—St.
Trinity—had stolen her soul, and she needs to get
it back through a vudoun ceremony.
At this point, things are getting pretty
cluttered in the novel. Does Stone wish his novel to be
a noirish thriller or a black comedy? I suppose there's
no reason why both can't be done—Jim Thompson
proved that numerous times—but the jarring tone shift
that occurs in the novel risks going beyond a narrative
surprise. What had started out as an American tale of adultery
and other small town darknesses transitions quite suddenly
into a Hawthorne-like tale, with an international Goodman
Brown moving down a phantasmagoric woodland path filled
with monsters, both external and internal. Like the original,
Michael has left behind his Faith—what little there
was of it. How readers will respond to this shift will vary,
no doubt creating camps of those that love Stone's
experimentation and those that simply find it incoherent.
There will also be those, like myself, who can stake out
a middle ground by carefully following the author's
thread through the murky night, while at the same time not
letting the story become overwhelmed by the shadows.
For Stone's purposes, Lara's
home, St. Trinity, is something of a generic “hotspot.”
Although similar to Compostela from Stone's Flag
for Sunrise, it lacks that novel's topical link
to the troubles of the time. There are rumors of rebels,
the CIA, Special Ops, Columbian drug runners—all roaming
the countryside and armed to the teeth. In the hills, voudon
drums constantly beat out the island's troubling heartbeat.
The place is quickly going to hell in a handbasket. Somehow,
knowledge of this rapidly growing, but seemingly remote,
danger reaches Michael while stateside, as both he and Lara
schedule to meet—and to dive—during the Easter
break. He is also there to lend support to the suddenly
weak Lara, who is frantic over her lost soul. The cast of
characters is ludicrous and for the most part evil. Even
the more neutral ones are over the top. For example, Liz
McKie, a reporter, and probable CIA informant, has a manic,
in-your-face air about her. She's like Dennis Hopper
whooping it up over Kurtz while still insisting she's
trying to do a job. Basically, like Michael, she digs the
action and the danger. She is also not to be trusted.
Michael lands in this mess and undergoes
something of a transformation. Gone is the drunk, lets-have-fun
guy, and now comes the hero. A plane—seeking to get
out before the balloon goes up—goes down in the bay
with some valuable goods, which angers the resident Columbian
drug lords. The connection between Lara's brother
and the drug lords is only hinted at, leaving the reader
to make guesses in the dark. Michael is dragooned—for
love's sake, not to mention Lara's life, to
make a night-time dive for the goods. This is another very
effective and well-written section. Though different, it
also recalls a similar scene from Stone's earlier
Flag for Sunrise. Both Holliwell from Flag for
Sunrise and Ahearn in Bay of Souls find themselves
making an actual but also metaphysical descent into the
unknown.
If Bay of Souls is about anything,
it's about descent. Michael's chance, his opportunity, is
only partially grasped. In the end, he plays Judas to both
himself and Lara. When Lara earlier asks Ahearn whether
he is with her —in the ranks of death,—he must
ultimately answer "No"—not that far, baby. Lara,
despite her jetsetting hipness, is indeed quite true in
her passions. She does love Michael. In the end, it's Michael
that hedges (before the cock crows?), though one can hardly
blame him as he runs through a demon-filled night, dodging
fire-drenched necklacing parties and dancing with a cigar-smoking
vudoun witch. Transcendence has its price, and its price
is harrowing.
What waits for him at home is not only
diminished, it is gone. Kristin has found his hunting friend—and
probable local CIA recruiter—to be more attuned to
the dull life, while Michael's son is distant and
disturbed. Even Megan the barmaid is changed, but in a way
that suggests she has found her own walk on the wild side
right in the U.S.A. Bay of Souls is not Stone's
best work. It is largely a return to areas previously mined—and
mined better—in earlier novels. Still, Bay of Souls
is a good novel and worth a careful reading. Stone, as always,
is the serious craftsman dealing with serious themes. It
is a disturbing novel, filled with haunting images that
resonate both in meaning and vividness long after the book
is finished. Stone's nightmarish island in the sun
will stand as that author's own small heart of darkness.
