| Review: Robert Stone, BAY OF SOULS |
| I approached Bay of Souls
by Robert Stone with a high degree of anticipation. A good book by
a great writer. An easy review. Now, I approach this review with a
hefty degree of trepidation. I read Bay of Souls twice. Then, still not trusting myself. I listened to it on tape. Well, I listened to the first six chapters. Then I gave up. Bay of Souls starts out seductively. The writing is topnotch. The main character, a professor of literature at a small rural college, is immediately engaging—smart, interesting, and troubled enough to make us want to follow wherever he may be headed. The early story is quick, intelligent, complex. And there’s a wonderful hunting scene so odd, yet so convincingly evoked, that it will stay with you as though you yourself had been sitting in that tree, watching the bizarre scene unfolding below you. And then, several chapters in, the book separates from itself and becomes something else entirely. Oh, there are continuities. The characters retain their names. The theme of religious faith (belief?)…how to interpret it, incorporate it, trust it…carries on. But the serious literary novel we’re invited into early on suddenly disappears. It becomes pulp. Okay, I realize a severely traumatic episode in a life can jolt that life to its foundations. Veer it off in odd directions, sometimes even set it on the path to destruction. But the early traumatic episode in Bay of Souls doesn’t end in tragedy. It simply ends. And the direction the book takes after that isn’t just unexpected, it’s unfathomable. I kept seeing the author waking up one morning several chapters into the book and thinking, I’m sick of this. Sick of sweating these lives out onto these pages. I think I’ll do it easy this time. Turn this thing into a thriller. They must be easier to write. So instead of exploring the whys and wherefores of the human psyche, of real people doing dumb and smart things and saving and ruining various facets of their lives, we find ourselves listening to the sound of constant drumming on a fictional island, dropping in on conversations of intrigue we don’t understand between people we’re inadequately introduced to, and experiencing things the main character doesn’t understand and the author fails to explain even to us. It’s as though the impression rather than the actual experience of conspiracy and possession and mystery and spiritualism is good enough. Ultimately, Bay of Souls left me confused. Kept me searching for the story to the end. And it makes me wonder if it was Robert Stone’s intention to leave us only with questions (Was it real? Was it illusion? Did something happen? Did nothing happen? Do we or do we not have a soul? If we do, can someone or something steal it? And if it’s stolen, can we get it back?) But two readings leave me pretty well convinced that Bay of Souls was simply handled too carelessly to make any of these questions worth asking.
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