Dying Causes, Tortured Choices

By Paul Gray

A FLAG FOR SUNRISE by Robert Stone; Knopf; 439 pages; $13.95

Frank Holliwell, 40, is a professor of anthropology in Maryland who once "did a job" for the CIA in Viet Nam. Years later he would just as soon forget the whole thing, but the Company is not about to do so. As he prepares to leave for a lecture in Central America, he is approached by Marty Nolan, a contact from the old days. It seems that something funny is going on in the Republic of Tecan, currently a safe haven for U.S. interests. "Our ambassador is a Birchite moron," Nolan reports. "The cops lock you up for reading Voltaire." What really troubles Nolan is the behavior of a Roman Catholic priest and nun, both Americans, who are defying their superiors by refusing to close down a small mission and clinic on the Caribbean coast. Surely Holliwell can find an excuse to drop in on Tecan and see what these people think they are doing? Holliwell replies that he cannot.

He is wrong, of course. No thriller worth the name sets up such expectations without delivering, and A Flag for Sunrise, Author Robert Stone's third novel, deserves that label and then some. The longer its main characters remain apart, the more certain it is that they must come together. Holliwell will find Father Charlie Egan and Sister Justin Feeney at the mysterious mission in Tecan. They will be joined by Pablo Tabor, a deserter from the Coast Guard and by far the wildest card in this deck. A homicidal speed freak ("Gimme a rush, Jesus. If you want me for a sunbeam"), Pablo signs on with Jack and Deedee Callahan, a permanently sloshed American couple who run guns in a cutter disguised as a shrimp boat. This work is not so easy or pleasant as it once was. Sizing up Pablo, his new crewman, Jack says, "I used to like it when the baddest thing around these parts was me. These days I'm just another innocent abroad." The boat, guns and Pablo are destined for Tecan.

To furnish the stage on which his strange cast converge, Stone takes his cue from Joseph Conrad, who set Nostromo in an imaginary South American republic called Costa-guana. Stone squeezes Tecan and its more progressive neighbor Compostela into a fictional space between Nicaragua and Costa Rica, and then provides topography and politics. The land here is racked periodically by earthquakes; when Holliwell arrives in Tecan, he senses the tremors of revolution as well. The local dictator, propped up by U.S. support and sadistic National Guardsmen wearing reflecting sunglasses, may have finally pushed his brutalized subjects too far. He is driving exploited coffee pickers off the land to make way for copper mining that will enrich him and his fellow oligarchs.

This background not only thickens Stone's plot, it also forces his characters into tortured moral choices. As chaos descends, some suffer less than others. In the solitude of his mission, Father Egan drinks and retreats to a nearby ruin, the site of ancient human sacrifice, where he preaches a muddled, gnostic mysticism to drugged-out hippies. Pablo arrives, hears Egan talk, and is converted to the notion that his vicious life has meaning: "There's a process and I'm in the middle of it. A lot of stuff I do is meant to be." Sister Justin, her faith waning, agrees to help the Tecanecan revolutionaries, whose cause demands the self-annihilation she has been striving for all her life. And Holliwell, the disillusioned "Viet Nam burnout," cannot help falling in love with her because she represents an alternative to the scorched earth of his life.

While they wrestle with their consciences, Holliwell and Sister Justin are being watched by hard-eyed men who have little patience with dark nights of the soul. Lieutenant Campos of the National Guard keeps track of the nun. Not a thoughtful type, he is just sensitive enough to demand absolution from Father Egan after a young woman has been murdered within the domain of his authority. He then declares that the priest has responsibility for the body, which Campos has carefully preserved in an ice chest in his home. The lieutenant knows that Sister Justin is his enemy; he waits for the mistake that will deliver her into his hands.

Meanwhile, Holliwell's presence in Tecan roils the local intelligence community. He keeps bumping into people who seem to know more about the purpose of his visit than he does. One of them is an Englishman named Ralph Heath, who now lives in Miami and does security work for a conglomerate that plans to buy played-out banana plantations and turn them into resort properties. Heath's bosses do not want their investments threatened by local unrest. Contemptuously, Heath pegs Holliwell as a muddled disturber of the peace.

He lectures the American: "You see, I'm the wrath of God in my tiny way. I don't go seeking out the misguided and the perverse, not at all. Those afflicted find me.

I'm the shark on the bottom of the lagoon.

You have to sink a damn long way before you get to me. When you do, I'm waiting.'' The private agonies of the main characters finally tip the balance of Stone's novel away from events, from what actually happens toward its impact on those who experience it. The upshot of the revolution is conveyed within a single throwaway sentence. Characters live or die as accident dictates, poetic justice be damned. Near the end of the novel, Sister Justin quotes two unacknowledged lines from Emily Dickinson: "A Wife--at Daybreak I shall be--/ Sunrise--Hast thou a flag for me?" The question, in this context, is especially poignant. What has happened in Tecan, to her and to others, suggests that new mornings may no longer bring new causes to espouse.

What if none of this matters? That is the troubling question Stone raises throughout the novel. He vividly portrays high adventure, but then makes it look of no more account than what the cynical Marty Nolan calls "a catalogue of ape behavior." He sets his characters the task of finding meaning for their lives, then sees to it that they will fail. "There's always a place for God," Holliwell asserts. "There is some question as to whether He's in it." This issue is not normally the stuff of espionage. Those readers who like their suspense neat may be unhappy with the freight Stone has added: nihilism, a cosmos that is indifferent if not actively malevolent, a philosophical puzzle that even death may not solve. A Flag for Sunrise takes a number of giant steps beyond the genre it imitates.

A few of them may indeed be stumbles: Stone sometimes confuses depth with murkiness, profundity with confusion. But he has produced a novel that is not just scary. It is frightening.

--By Paul Gray

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