In Refiner's Fire, Mark Helprin makes his adventurer several sizes larger than life and eschews realism for a prose charged with romantic extravagances and purple rhetoric: as if The Odyssey had been updated and rewritten by Dylan Thomas in his less sober moments. While still a schoolboy, Marshall Pearl hunts down Rastafarian brigands in the Jamaican jungle, outshooting professional soldiers. He sails and even swims through a hurricane, makes 'perfect love' to 'the most beautiful woman he had ever seen', and as a recruit in the Israeli army shows a grasp of strategy that could have put Dayan out of business.

Occasionally, Helprin's imagery is strikingly apt. Pearl's Harvard contemporaries 'spoke with a's so flat that they could slide them under doors'. Too often, he lurches haphazardly from simile to simile and metaphor to metaphor, obscuring where he should be clarifying. In Brindisi harbour, 'miscellaneous unkempt craft … nestle...