Fiction: Professor of English at a minor university, Michael has a beautiful son, an undemanding job and an attractive, if edgy, wife. Michael enjoys hunting deer; not that he likes killing, he just gets a kick out of being out with the guys.
He also does some serious diving. But there's no mistaking it, everything has been too easy. Michael is bored. His only real excitement is listening to his wife accuse him of being unfaithful. Still, he is fond of her and he adores his son, whose every phase of change he notices.
Robert Stone, author of A Hall of Mirrors, Dog Soldiers, A Flag for Sunrise and Outerbridge Reach, is a professional novelist. Serious subjects, such as the Vietnam War and its legacy, drug trafficking, US foreign policy, the exploitation of the Third World, the collapse of society and the maze that is human consciousness, preoccupy him. Every sentence throbs with assurance.
From the opening sentence of this, his seventh novel, and first since the somewhat ponderous Damascus Gate in 1998, he concentrates on establishing his central character's interest in his son. All appears well domestically, on the surface at least - but it is clearly not so good. Kristin, his wife, is troubled, and her tension runs parallel with Michael's boredom. In the absence of any specific problem to argue about, she needles him about his pretty assistant. Michael, however, is not involved with the girl. His wife may not believe him, but the reader does.
Instead, with lightning speed, Stone places his hero in the direct path of a far more dangerous threat - a woman of mystery. Yawn. Lara is an unlikely new addition to the university's politics department. Almost comically, Michael is sexually recruited by this cartoon femme fatale, who has an accent, a political past, a range of sporting skills and a direct approach. She woos him on the squash court.
Within pages - in fairness to Stone, it is a fast-moving narrative and, boy, does Lara move fast - the two are engaged in a highly charged affair. It is the stuff of male fantasy, an ultra-cool heroine who does not care a damn about the formidable wife back home, or the future.
The more excited Michael becomes about his adventures with Lara, the more sexually alert he becomes to his wife. Suddenly, his son is not so fascinating. Lara is all. It is surprisingly tedious. And then Lara decides Michael must come with her to her island paradise where her family's hotel continues to serve the tourists. More pressingly, however, a ceremony is due to take place. A year has passed since the death of her brother, and she must attend the ritual in which the mourners will join in taking his soul back from the sea. She also hopes, of course, to reclaim her own soul in the process.
"My soul is lost" she says to Michael. "I think someone keeps it for me."
Cue for the reader to abandon the book.
The lovers plan their jaunt to Lara's Caribbean paradise. Meanwhile, Michael's wife moves on from simmering rage to outright anger. Michael gambles with her lack of interest in diving and calls his wife's bluff. Off he goes alone on the trip.
To say Stone has written a yarn is an understatement. None of the characters is remotely believable, never mind likeable. None of them appears as more than a puppet caught up in a small-scale soap opera. But then Stone is not interested in them. They barely serve his thesis, which is corruption. The island paradise is, as expected, in upheaval. The US is present, as is a Colombian faction. It is a dangerous place but it is also a tourist haven.
Every line of dialogue appears to have been culled at random from the average island thriller. Alongside the cynical natives is the hard-bitten young US female journalist who spits out her words. If Michael and Lara's romance is unbelievable, events on the island are even crazier. For all its speed and the clarity of his precise, no-nonsense prose - Stone does write well - this novel is a bewildering disappointment. Particularly as it follows Bear and His Daughter: Stories, a strong collection published without fanfare a couple of years ago.
Bay of Souls is an entirely bizarre concoction. By the time Lara and Michael, who have travelled separately, are reunited, events have run on so fast that there is no time for a romantic interlude. A small plane has crashed into the reef. Lara has a problem: parcels have gone down with it. She needs Michael to do some diving for her. This is dangerous, so Lara tries some rhetoric about love and death, sufficiently self-serving rubbish to ensure that any selfish adulterous husband in possession of a domestic refuge would run back to reality. Not Michael, though. He agrees to dive.
It is as well that he does. The dive sequence almost justifies the book. When Michael locates the lost plane, he immediately notices the amount of fish within it. There is a sense of the darkness, the silence and the life under the sea. All of this is well done, and even better is the description of Michael's awareness that he might be facing death as things go wrong during his ascent.
Yet all this drama is lost when he resurfaces to the comic-style baddies waiting for him above the sea. Late in the novel, the Colonel, a member of the occupying force, explains the moral dilemma facing places such as the island:
"We've inherited bloody paradise and now we've got to live by selling it. Paradise and every naughty little thing . . . The drugs, the coffee, the chocolate, the rum and the orange- flavoured booze, the tobacco, the girls, the boys. Shouldn't have them. Bad for you. Live longer without them but they're so nice, yes, indeed. How you want them all. And that's our fortune."
Perhaps he should have added "our fate" as well. But the point is that Stone, in writing about the clichés of island corruption, has also been caught by those same clichés. Michael finally takes flight and the outcome of his adventure proves pretty predictable. As is this fast-moving and hasty romance-cum-political-thriller. It reads more as a potential low-budget, sub-Greene film script, marred by poor dialogue and flat characterisation, than as a novel from a writer who can, and has, written far more convincingly on the very themes that preoccupy him here.
• Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
