Moral examples Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone Picador 3.95 Cutter and Bone by Newton Thornburg Blue Murder 3.95 Reviewed by Steve Taylor *.. That winter, the Military Ad- visory Command, Vietnam had decided that elephants were enemy agents because the NVA used them to carry things,.. All over the country, whooping sweating gunners descended from the cloud cover to stam- pede the herds and mow them down with 7.62-millimeter machine guns. *The Great Elephant Zap had been too much and had dis- gusted everyone ... *And as for dope, Converse thought, and addicts - if the world is going to contain elephants persued by lying men, people are just as naturally going to want to get high.* John Converse is a failed SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 25, June 1990
REVIEWS journalist at the frozen limit of Vietnam, confounded by the daily horror, his own cowardice, and in a state of permanent confusion. Dog Soldiers is a visceral and unforgiving fiction which tears at the heart of the American Dream. It is brutal, frank and unrelenting.
In the absence of coherence, Converse acts in hallucinatory tandem with the forces which surround him. He buys three kilos of heroin and agrees to organise their delivery to the States. The process is a vague and largely unvalued means of making sense of madness, a buying out of time and place.
He induces his Stateside wife, Marge, into the scheme and Ray Hicks, a merchant sailor and former marine. The plan is ill-conceived and poorly executed. Converse has bought into his own nightmare, a mark from the moment that he accepts responsibility. The consequences of the transaction are violent and without quarter.
Hicks takes reluctant control of the heroin and Marge, attempt-
ing to salvage the deal and survive. They flee towards the Mexican border and sanctuary, the sub-government agents who have overseen the delivery in pursuit. The flying men have come home.
When I was in Nam, I guess I've told you, we did pretty much what all the outfits there did. Not exactly My Lais, not that big anyway, but we did our part, everybody did his little part over there... Well, back here, with time, you know, you had time to study them, those pictures. and you know what I found out? I found that you have three reactions. Rich, only three. The first one is simple - I hate America. But then you study them some more, and you move up a notch. There is no God. But you know what you say finally. after you've studied them all you can? You say - I'm hungry:*
Cutter is a disabled war veteran, in pepetual anger and searing pain. Richard Bone is a drifting Lothario, as athletic, tanned and outwardly attractive as Cutter is unpretty and soured. Cutter's wife Mo forms the apex of their ramshackle triangle. She is quietly despairing, devoted and perenially drugged. They
live within sight of the Pacific Ocean and slow poverty. Cutter and Bone is a joumey into hell. Bone is witness to a murder, and under Cutter's ob- sessive guidance the two of them em- bark on a spiralling blackmail attempt of the maybe killer. The expedition is as doomed as sun- set. Thomburg's novel is bitter, pas- sionate, and ex- treme. Neither Cutter nor Bone are cer- tain of the killer's identity and neither of them are even convinced of the economic reason- ing behind their project. But in the zero of an altema- tive, both are pulled inexorably towards the American heartland. The place where the car decals read: My God is Alive - Sorry about Yours'. Cutter and Bone is a savage, compassionate book, totally un- compromising and utterly con- vincing. In addition to the quality of the writing, it is the lack of com- promise which distinguishes both novels. Honesty without il- lusion is a rare commodity and it is perhaps indicative of a gather- ing reluctance that they were first published in the 1970's. Nevertheless, they tell us more about America in Vietnam than any number of revised histories and a gross of Hollywood epics. Dog Soldiers and Cutter and Bone are a parallel response to the same dilemma: meaning and commitment in the absence of a valid moral or ethical structure. They are desperate statements without English equivalent and they deserve to be read ''. Let smiles cease," Con- verse said. "Let laughter flee. This is the place where everyone finds out who they are. " Hicks shook his head. "What a bum- mer for the gooks."* Page 31
The Krays. Film, starring Billie Whitelaw, Gary and Martin Kemp Review by lan McLarty *Clothes are important; they say what you are' say Ronnie and Reggie Kray to two new con- verts at their club, showing up the major fault of this movie. Throughout the film the style of The Krays is slick, the camera work and effects excellent, and direction reasonably tight; but equally throughout, the content, the naked fear the Kray twins en- gendered, is missing. Ultimately it was not what the Krays looked like that ter- rified people; it was what was stuffed inside the suits; more im- portant it was what they were capable of doing which made the Krays what they became. The point is again made later in the film when one of their gang states that he is now con- sidered glamorous - to be told by the twins fear is glamour". Even if this dubious premise is SOCIALIST OUTLOOK Wrong on Nicaragua Gareth Mostyn ('Wrong Lessons From Sandinista Defeat' Socialist Outlook 24) is right to say that we must show our solidarity with the oppressed in Nicaragua. But we must also be honest about what happened. The FSLN split from the PSN, Nicaragua's Stalinist Party, in 1961, just two years after the Cuban revolution through Latin America. While the PSN leaders argued for support to Samoza, and for a 'democratic alliance' to push him left(!), the FSLN founders looked to the Cuban road of revolution. But the FLN kept many ideas it learnt in the PSN. Its 1969 program calls for a revolutionary government based on the worker-peasant al- Page 32
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