The Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone

Here is yet another entry to my personal list of novels which, although they have won honors and/or have been praised by critics, I heartily dislike. I felt this way about Post Office by Charles Bukowski and Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion. And now this one.

The Dog Soldiers won the National Book Award in 1975 and has been included on Time's Top 100 Novels list. It has been compared to Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and I can see that Stone aims for that same theme and tone. But he misses it by a mile. Instead we have portraits of people who are aimless, without emotion, motivated by impulse, drug and alcohol addled, cynical and dead inside. Whereas Conrad's novel portrays dark universal traits in precise yet metaphorical prose, Stone's book features characters who are all petty and actually fairly naive, rather than being seduced by the black impulses of the human psyche. And the writing all sounds like a hip screen play. It is very much a novel of the '70s, with the frequent use of drug slang and the general cynicism of the late Vietnam War era, when the hippie dreams had failed.

The plot goes a little something like this: John Converse has been half-heartedly covering the Vietnam War as a journalist, when he decides to attempt a big heroine drug deal, though he is inexperienced in trafficking. He enlists the help of an old friend and of his stateside wife, only to have them disappear from sight when a corrupt Federal agent enters the picture. From here on the novel becomes pretty much a standard thriller, with the race on to see who ends up with the drugs.

Sometimes when I dislike a novel I realize that it's because my least favorite people in the world are those who are aimless and selfish and self-destructive and substance addicted and blame society for all their problems. I don't want to be around them and I don't want to read about them. That's the case here, I'm sure.