Robert Stone's [A Flag for Sunrise] is sweeping and ambitious. It deals with major political and social themes; it is set in a small, backward, near-mythic Central American country; it has a large, diverse cast of characters whose fates draw them inexorably to the same place at the same moment; it invites comparison, according to promotional material, with For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Naked and the Dead.

Since both those novels are vastly overrated, the comparison is apt. Notwithstanding all the baggage it carries, A Flag for Sunrise has little to recommend it. Stone writes very well, he creates plausible characters, and he has a deft hand for dramatic incident. But he is a preacher masquerading in novelist's clothing, indulging himself in rhetoric right out of SDS or the IWW. It is the politics of his novels rather than the craft of them that seems ultimately...