Voodoo but no real magic

The title of Robert Stone’s new novel, “Bay of Souls,” is evocative of other times, of thwarted adventurers on the high seas, of midnight attacks, of political intrigue and spies, of palm trees and beaches under the moon and important moral imperatives. Say “Bay of ... “ to Americans of a certain age, and they’ll know how to finish the phrase.

Stone is one of our great living writers, and always an explosive and problematic one. He can set a scene like almost no one else. If he writes a chase, you know it will be speedy and vibrant and filled with things other than the simple act of pursuit. He is brilliant when it comes to visual description, a genius at tough dialogue. He likes to stuff his books with a kaleidoscope of humanity. And he knows how to wrap politics and spirituality into his plots in a way that can make them seem like essential aspects of living a life.

So hearing the title “Bay of Souls,” anyone familiar with Stone’s work will expect politics and a thriller and, in all likelihood, a hallucinogenic spiritual quest. Conceptually, the book is a part of Stone’s ongoing engagement with the essential questions: What does it mean to be human? What is consciousness? Where did we come from? Where are we headed? What is the meaning of right, of good, of love? “Bay of Souls” addresses these eternal mysteries, but it doesn’t push our understanding forward. Nor does all the excitement amount to much. “Bay of Souls” is a witch doctor’s title: The book conjures spirits, but it doesn’t quite make them appear.

Stone tells the story of Michael Ahearn, a likable middle-aged English professor at a mid-level college, handsome (Stone is at pains to tell us), intelligent and in the throes of a midlife crisis -- a personal and spiritual emergency -- that he is trying manfully to soldier through in a decent way. He has the requisite hard, aging wife and difficult adolescent child. The book readies the reader for a tale of adultery; it begins very promisingly with fraught, unsentimental family scenes played out against the cold academic winter. Ahearn goes hunting too. Unsurprisingly, Stone is very good at evoking the masculine camaraderie and rivalry that come with this turf.

The hunt, and the “boozing” conversations after, leave the impression that this will be a taut novel of psychological suspense, emotional contortion and spiritual redemption. There is no nonsense in Stone’s best writing, and there is truth too. “[Ahearn] sat with the safety off, tense, vigilant, unhappy, waiting for the deer. He considered the wind, although there was hardly any.” Throughout the book, sentences like those flame out at you.

All the cinematic Stone soup of drugs and religion and politics is cooked up and served in “Bay of Souls,” though the only drug that’s used in this book (if you exclude religion) is alcohol. Readers familiar with Stone’s work would expect this much; unfortunately, however, the novel moves as if it consisted entirely of the beginnings of many films. Suspense lurks everywhere. It seems to override every other consideration, but this tension is not satisfying if it is not resolved. The opening hunting scene involves many guns and much potential killing. There is Ahearn’s son too, almost frozen in the snow; he might die. A torrid sadomasochistic love scene follows; will it end in murder or suicide? There is a scene in a hospital that generates strong waiting-room uncertainty. Later, Ahearn arrives on a tropical island in the midst of violent political unrest. Here in the heat, we see a car with a scary, unreadable dark-skinned colonel of questionable motivation, heavily armed Colombian drug dealers who may open fire at any time. At an airport, our hero may not get on the plane in time. There are scenes in airplanes and scenes deep below the surface of the Caribbean sea. There is even a plane crash. The book seems to move well because it moves a lot.

The problems come -- as they did in Stone’s preceding novel, “Damascus Gate” -- when the plot thickens and spirituality enters. In “Bay of Souls,” the spiritual question and the love interest combine in the mysterious figure of Lara Purcell, a colleague of Ahearn’s who hails from a composite Caribbean island called St. Trinity, where her soul was stolen away by her (now deceased) twin brother and given into the charge of the minor voodoo goddess Marinette. When Ahearn falls for Lara -- who can play a terrific game of squash and indulge in autoerotic strangulation -- the books morphs from a midlife masterpiece into a thriller in the style of the 1970s, a cliche-ridden narrative featuring the CIA and the Cali cartel: haute “Miami Vice.” It’s like a parody of a Robert Stone novel.

There’s a ton of plot, pound after pound of it, and the taut line that should keep the book moored is lost amid uncharted twists and turns. There is a good deal of deliberate disorientation (much of it caused by a voodoo ceremony that seems too satanic and dark, though in his St. Trinity scenes, Stone does capture the sheer strangeness of voodoo), but a good deal more disorientation that is not. For example, we witness a high-level drug deal gone awry, in which Lara seems to be mixed up, though how, we can’t tell. She attempts to get her soul back at a long voodoo ceremony, but we can’t tell for sure if it has come back, because Stone drops her before the end of the book, only to have her surface briefly toward the end as a hallucination on a horse.

Even Lara’s political alliances are confused, and no answer is given as to who -- in the end -- was her boss. She seems to have connections to what we used to call the Agency, as well as to a right-wing Central American military-slash-drug-dealer type, though she was a lefty in Paris and also has had earlier affairs with both Graham Greene and with Castro (a heady mix!). To explain Lara’s political shift, Stone says that she “changed sides” without offering a single phrase or sentence of further explanation. Politics doesn’t really matter here. It’s just a backdrop for action.

Throughout the book, one has the feeling that Stone lets the story lead him to subjects that might amuse him or mean something to him personally -- hence the needless and anachronistic affairs with Greene and Castro, the wheeling in, for a few Hitchcockian pages, of the menacing General Triptelemos (General Trip, his nickname) and the pipings of the gratuitously awful female journalist on St. Trinity, among just a few pointless plot bits and pieces. These idiosyncratic references and allusions don’t pay off. Stone seems to think he is doing and conveying more than he actually does do or convey.

“Bay of Souls” had every chance in the world with Stone as its author and an opening that most writers would sell their souls to Marinette for. In the end, it’s worth paging through for those bits because Stone is dazzling when he’s dazzling. He can create gasps of awe with his paragraphs: descriptions of the young son or of the Ahearns’ marriage, or of a market in St. Trinity, or of a deep sea dive, and musings on marine, and human life and death on a coral reef.

One of the book’s most moving passage comes during the hunting scenes at the beginning of the book, when Ahearn waits in a tree for his prey, only to find passing in the crosshairs of his gun a sort of homeless prophet who is screaming foul curses at a dead deer that keeps tumbling out of his wheelbarrow.

Many scenes are funny or poignant: the douane of St. Trinity requiring a “pink form” for departure from the island; the interrogation of Ahearn by a very threatening Cali cartel woman; the return of wheelbarrow man at the end of the book, in the form of a voodoo acolyte on St. Trinity, rolling a goat in for sacrifice.

The best work in “Bay of Souls” reminds you that its author is the Stone of “Dog Soldiers,” who wrote that brilliant and subtle opening, set in a windless park in Saigon, where John Converse shares a hard bench with the missionary lady, the same author who then laid down the complicated gonzo licks of that plot to its dark end. Like so many of Stone’s books, that one delivered on its out-of-proportion promises. This one doesn’t.