Bay of Souls

i don't agree with many of the readers who panned this stone novel. i agree that stone set a high bar for himself in previous books, and that this one falls short, but still think a subpar stone novel is a notch short of a classic. there are familar themes and motifs -- an academic, war, revolution, drugs, sex, deep-sea diving, religion -- as stone weaves his tale of an angst-ridden professor who follows an affair to third world revolution. my criticism is that the novel feels like two books crudely bolted together: part 1 takes part in a midwestern university; part 2 takes part primarily on a carribean island undergoing revolution. despite this flaw and the confusing climax on the island, this still has ton to offer and ponder. the writing is earing and memorable as always. the insights and surehanded descriptions of academic life, DC politics and war are powerful. and the spiritual quest at the book's heart will leave you pondering for a while. so, yes, flawed. but give me a flawed stone novel anyday!

The novel's strengths are in its taut, beautiful, suspenseful descriptions of man and nature. There are two key scenes, beautifully written, charged with suspense, surreal and macabre, which carry the whole book: a hunting sequence and a diving sequence. Unfortunately, these scenes are at the beginning and near the end, and much of what connects them is not nearly as vivid or as suspenseful. Still, it's a very short novel, and well worth the investment of time. As with most of Stone's books, one occasionally feels as if he is clobbering you over the head with his contrived, deliberate themes on the state of America ("America is my theme" - R.S.), but there's less of that here than in something like, say, Outerbridge Reach, where he expanded the image of America as a rudderless ship of state in the hands of an ill-equipped captain to ridiculous length. Maybe the Voudoun imagery was liberating, although most of the Divine Horsemen stuff feels lifted from Maya Deren without having been really felt or digested by Stone himself.

I read this book twice, about two years apart. The relatively short novel (much shorter than the overwhelming "Damascus Gate") has two main and quite different locales, each described, in detail, in compressed prose: a college town in the upper Midwest, and a fictional island in the Caribbean, somewhere near Puerto Rico, named St. Trinity. Stone uses his literary gifts to evoke both cultures, as well as the politically unstable Haiti-inspired history of St. Trinity and other nearby islands including Cuba. What emerges is the great contrast between the Caribbean and the upper Midwest, with neither taking precedence in this sharply bifurcated novel. All of these remarkable passages, which includes such fine details as a poker chip from the Caribe Hilton in San Juan,and numerous interesting people from both cultures, forms a backdrop for the more important issues of character development, mostly of the novel's two main characters. Most reviewers have said the novel's protagonist is college professor Michael O'Hearn, who leaves his wife and son for an affair with Caribbean sex siren and political activist professor Lara Purcell. O'Hearn is a man of limited faith, a liberal, in a very conservative Midwestern world, probably Minnesota. He hates to take his son to church services, where they "teach humiliation as a blessing." Like Rev.Graham Hess in M. Night Shymalan's film "Signs", who loses his faith after the death of his wife in a car accident, O'Hearn is a believer in "random singularity", so that when his young son Paul recovers from a case of hypothermia, he does not view it as an act of God. His wife, long-boned, long-legged and descended from prairie sodbusters, can also be bitchy and beautiful--and she is increasingly interested in another man, one of Michael's colleagues. As a result of some of these problems,and also out of boredom, Michael doesn't sleep well, and he has a drinking problem. You could also argue, less persuasively, perhaps, that the novel's main protagonist is Lara, who has lost her voodoo soul.She returns to her homeland St. Trinity, after her brother's death from AIDS, to retrieve it, as well as to rescue her brother from the land of the undead. If you had to choose you would probably say that the novel is mainly about the Third World, but the sections on the American Midwest, as for example on a Fall hunting expedition,inside a Catholic church service or an English classroom, are also quite noteworthy. Sports, including squash & racquetball, swimming, and particularly scuba diving as well as hunting, also play a central role in the novel,much more central, I realized, on a second reading. Professor O'Hearn also takes note of the cathartic effects of war, in dialogues with students. Stone also does a lot of name-dropping of various culturals icons:Hollywood, music, literature, mythology, religion (both Catholic and voodoo), history and politics, both real and fictional. There is an annotated "Bay Of Soul

I was surprised that Stone's fans were so disappointed with this novel. It isn't perfect, but it is certainly a thrilling story.Midway through the course of his life, Michael Ahearn finds himself in a dark woods, with the right way obscured. From there, things really start to go downhill. Ahearn's descent into the inferno provides the reader with an exciting ride. The feeling that he deserves his fate enhanced my enjoyment of this misadventure. When we first meet Ahearn, he is a study in hypocrisy. In the opening scene, he is giving his son a bunch of transparently insincere reasons why he cannot join his father's hunting trip. We accompany Ahearn on this trip to discover that he loathes hunting, and in particular despises the kind of people who hunt to put food on the table. Ahearn sends his son to a Catholic school, although he really despises Catholics and cringes at the school's influence over his son. Ahearn likes to keep up a façade of religiosity while harboring a petulant resentment against the universe for failing to provide the fairy-tale god of his childhood Sunday school classes. For most of the story, we are limited to Ahearn's perception. We really are not given any insight into his wife's feelings, although we can see that she is distant and discontent. We see Ahearn becoming infatuated with a woman who really quite frightening. The point of view is quite effective here because any attempt to explain or interpret this relationship would be impossible. You simply have to accept that it is happening. The limited narration is especially effective at the end of the story, because Ahearn does not seem to understand why he has become frightening to others. We merely see them being frightened for no apparent reason. But Ahearn seems as benighted spiritually as he ever was. The meaning of his experience to the author remains rather vague. I think this made the novel less satisfying then Stone's earlier works.

Robert Stone has done it again in this little novel. Bay of Souls, like his previous books, has the hero in a personal crisis in a dangerous place. On a tiny Caribbean island there are many dark forces at work and they are not just political.It is an exciting story and Stone's plots are tinged with metaphor. Once again we see how the great powers act in the Third World countries they say they are liberating. As Liz McKie, a Miami Herald reporter, says of the American intervention in St. Trinity "..we don't quite get the bad guys out and the good guys turnout to be not very different from the bad guys and, hey, it's all looking kind of the same as it was."Some critics have savaged this book and DeLillo's Cosmopolis I think unfairly. It's maybe because these writers say what they think and step on a few toes.This is a great read and is written in taut chilled prose. Read it and decide for yourself.