Off and on I have been reading Robert Stone since I was nineteen, beginning with the novel, Dog Soldiers, which was published in 1973. A film adaptation came out in 1978 called Who’ll Stop the Rain. Here is an instance of the book-is-not-always-better-than-the-movie; or, rather, in some ways the book is better, but in other ways the film is.
In any case, the plot concerns three young adults who embroil themselves in a predicament of extreme danger. John Converse is an American journalist who has been covering the Vietnam conflict. He is morally burned out and expresses his disillusionment by smuggling three kilos of heroin back to the States. He enlists the aid of his drug-addled wife, Marge, and a friend from his military days named Ray Hicks. The latter is, at the time, a merchant seaman who will do the actual smuggling. Upon arrival in California, they are in hot water; not with the law as such but with a corrupt federal agent and his murderous thugs.
Converse and his wife are pushovers insofar as the real bad guys are concerned, but Ray Hicks is a formidable force. In addition to his native street smarts, he is a former marine and a devotee of martial arts. His resistance to his pursuers has little or nothing to do with the monetary value of the product he carries, or with the personal pleasure he might derive from it. His refusal to make a deal or surrender outright is founded on sheer pride, not to mention a craving for danger:
‘If I walk away from this, he thought, I’ll be an old man—all ghosts and hangovers and mellow recollections… This is the one. This is the one to ride till it crashes.’
And it does crash, hard. But until then Ray lives out, with twisted nobility and stylish defiance, his brand of devotion to the samurai ideal. His memorable death-march along a vast stretch of railroad tracks transforms him into a kind of Christ figure: he is, in a sense, carrying the pains and sins of the world (in the form of heroin, wounds, and weapons of war). This sort of symbolism can easily lapse into cliché, but the author pulls it off convincingly.
The minor characters who are included in the story are effective as well, at least for the most part. Antheil, the corrupt agent, is smooth and sharp and wicked. His two thugs, Danskin and Smitty, are comically horrific. Eddie Peace, a Hollywood hotshot who Ray approaches as a prospective buyer, might remind one of a hedonistic Roman emperor transplanted to the modern era. The guru named Dieter, on the other hand, struck me as somewhat weak, not a total failure as a character but unmemorable.
Robert Stone, who died in 2015, wrote like a hipster variant of Graham Greene. The style is mordant and laconic, sometimes funny and frequently poetic. It’s clear that he was at home with the material he wrote about, in this novel and elsewhere.
