Customer Reviews

Bay of Souls

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

I think that Robert Stone has written some great books, but this is not one of them. Bay of Souls seems torn between an Dellilo style life in the USA novel, and the usual Stone third world Conradesque action/philosophy thriller. Sad to say, but the academic parts, the creeping ennuie, the sudden adultery, minutia of modern life, etc. seem much more real than the drug crazed revolutionary danger parts, which is too bad because there are a lot of people who do the Delillo/Carver thing and not a lot who can pull off the headlong rush of Robert Stone.

This simply is not Stone's best work. While Michael Ahearn's motivations are believable--the marriage is comatose, the relationship with his son awkward--the plot is both farfetched and burdened by coincidence. He just happens to dive Great Lake wrecks in his spare time and, oh, by the way, his lover is going to need him to dive a plane wreck during their tryst in the Islands? Not likely, not logical, not well planned.

I've been a Robert Stone fan since way back, but I never finished Damascus Gate and Bay of Souls was a big let-down. It was a mish-mash of foriegn intrigue and existential angst and male sexual fantasy. What went wrong? This guy is one of our best. Hopefully, this is just a temporary diversion.

I find myself agreeing with some of the other reviewers. This book isn't poor writing style, but the story is so far-fetched, improbable and just plain unbelievable that this book cant be saved. There are two related stories, neither of which really works. First there is a group of professors deer hunting in the winter in a godforsaken part of minnesota (this is the characters' opinion, not to offend anyone). A few strange things happen, and the main character comes home to find his son has been lost in the snow. The son nearly dies, but miraculously pulls through. The main character goes on to meet a woman professor who has just come to teach at the college. She dresses exotically, comes from a ficitious Caribbean island, goes in for a little S&M, and he falls head over heels, despite his jealous wife and little son. After the woman tells him her brother has died of AIDS, has xtolen her soul and given it to a voodoo queen who died two hundred years ago, and how dangerous it is to walk around in a body without a soul (a recitation that would send most men running scared), he decides to pack up and go down to the island with her. Although it's hard to tell what is really going on, things get wilder and wilder, with Haitian voodoo ceremonies, Colombian drug gangs, Latin-American style juntas supported by the U.S. governement. At this point I felt the author was just letting his imagination run wild or he didnt know what he was talking about. If you've read this far, you'll have a hard time finishing, although I did. You''ll wish you hadnt. I cant believe people act like this.

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.

Bay of Souls is a relatively short novel that is interesting but at times convoluted. I have only read one other book by Robert Stone, Damascus Gate, which I thought was brilliant. This one, though not without merit, was a bit of a disappointment to me. Michael Ahearn is a professor at a small rural college. He is married and has a twelve-year old son. Michael's life is not unhappy, but it has a bleak quality to it, similar to the cold Northern landscape he inhabits. His marriage is basically good, but his wife Kristin is a formidable and somewhat aloof woman who seems to intimidate him a little. In short, like many men approaching middle age, Michael is doing all right, but feels confined and has the desire to experience something new. This something comes in the form of Lara Purcell, an exotically beautiful professor from a Caribbean island called St. Trinity. They impulsively start an affair and when Lara returns to her island home after her brother dies, Michael comes along. This, to me, is where the novel falters. While the contrast between the rural American heartland and the Third World tropics is obviously a deliberate part of the book, the transition is so abrupt that it seemed to me like a different book altogether. On St. Trinity, Stone throws in a host of confusing, though typical (though more for a spy or suspense type novel) elements --corrupt officials, Columbian drug dealers, an intrepid reporter, American troops who covertly support a dictator. This part of the novel is a little cliched, with Michael running into the same cast of cloak-and-dagger type characters wherever he goes. The spirit of Voodoo also pervades the island, and this is central to the story. Lara believes her dead brother took possession of her soul before he died. She is now committed to retrieving it, which means she has to take part in some elaborate rituals. Lara is also deeply involved in all the political intrigue, in a way that is not well explained. For example, it is briefly noted that she was once a socialist (who may have had an affair with Castro) but then suddenly "switched sides" to support right wing extremists...why? Lara also apparently had some covert reason for teaching at Michael's college; this too is never explained. I suppose these questions are not really the point of the novel, but for me they were holes that I can more easily tolerate in a suspense thriller than a literary novel like this one. Finally, the Voodoo aspect of the tale remains ambiguous --are the occult forces real or only in the minds of the participants? I suppose it isn't necessarily crucial to know this, but I simply found myself with too many unanswered questions by the end of the book. Robert Stone is an interesting and original writer. His use of language is always creative and there are many turns of phrase that I admired in this book, even while I was less than satisfied with their context.

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 Souls" on the Web. The novel has quite an international scope, which includes France,Ireland, Argentina, Mexico, and Africa.

Michael O'Hearn recognizes in a self-deprecating way that he is by birth a Midwestern hick, though well-educated, and that his college town is in "Flyoverland" to other parts of the U.S. Besides the rich tapestry of the prose, the novel's strength lies in O'Hearn's conscious decision to exchange a rather staid and sedate married lifestyle--a life with many benefits, though also with limitations--for one that is wildly uninhibited and dangerous, with a woman he loves and who loves him. Though he claims to love Lara and wife Kristin equally, his relationship with Lara involves him in many inevitable deceptions. Certainly, by novel's end, he has learned something about the world outside his parochial academic Midwest.

Robert Stone has long been one of my favorite writers, but this book is terribly disappointing. The characters are flat, cliched and uninteresting. They are merely reruns of previous characters in earlier and finer novels. The action is predictable and mundane. If an unknown writer would have submitted this to a publisher they would have gotten a devestating rejection note, I'm afraid. I'm going to reread "A Flag For Sunrise", to remind me of how good Robert Stone can write.

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.

After a fine opening, another look at adultery in academia, the plot goes crazy with a soul trapped in an emerald and a revolution on an island. Totally unbelievable. Silly dialogue. Where was the editor? Definitely this is one of the worst books I've ever read by an acclaimed author.