SOURCE: Quinn, Paul. “All Things to All Men.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4987 (30 October 1998): 26.

In the following review, Quinn claims that Damascus Gate contains flat language, too many plots and characters, and fails in its aspirations as a thriller.

A great deal of profoundly fractured cerebration had gone down in Vietnam. People had been by turns Fascist mystics, Communist revolutionaries and junkies; at certain times, certain people had managed to be all three at once. It was the nature of the time. …

The above quotation from Robert Stone's A Flag for Sunrise (1977) can be read as a distillation of the skewed world-view, the disappointed politics and the spilt religiosity evident throughout the oeuvre of a novelist whose writing career began as a US Navy journalist, serving in what Don DeLillo has called “the first self-conscious war”. The—by turns—cynical, opportunistic, or sublimating shifts of allegiance, the implied relationship...