When the opening scene of your book concerns a conflicted Priest getting drunk in a fictional Latin American country, you can be pretty damn sure the comparison to Graham Greenn will come tumbling after. Robert Stone- who has labored under such comparisons for his entire career- won the PEN/Faulkner award for A Flag For Sunrise in 1981 when it was first published. The book braids together three different plot lines, two Greenian, one decidedly not. A nun named Sister Justin suffers a crisis of faith while trying to help a coalition of indigenous peoples and Marxist guerrillas overthrow a military dictatorship in Tecan, a fictional Latin American nation. Holliwell, an American businessman haunted by the specter of Vietnam and his spook past is asked to go to Tecan to find out what she's up to. Meanwhile, a Coast Guard deserter, speed-freak and all around badass named Pablo Tabor falls in with some smugglers shipping in guns to help fuel the revolution.
Weaving through themes of Catholicism, US intervention in Latin America, idealism and bravery, doubt and faith, A Flag For Sunrise is a slow burn. Just when any one plot line seems to get going, Stone shifts gears to sit in with a new protagonist. The wait, however, is worth it. Like any good epic, A Flag For Sunrise portrays the ways that individuals shape and are shaped by forces larger than themselves, and once the puzzle pieces are in place, the book becomes hard to put down. Whether the revolution will be successful or not, and what that means for the fate of the various characters, is left up in the air until the very end, and the last one hundred or so pages are particularly enthralling, emotionally and physically brutal and forcefully written.
If there's one criticism to level at the book, its the way the novel refuses to give us an insider's perspective on Tecan. Although like any good epic, A Flag For Sunrise shows how individuals interact with and are shaped by the larger forces around them, this remains a book about white people meddling in a foreign nation, and at only one point (for what smell like strictly expository purposes) do we get the perspective of any of the locals. In a way, the novel uses Tecan the way the characters in the novel seek to use Tecan to advance their own ends.
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