Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers, made into a successful film, dealt with what his publishers termed 'post Vietnam trauma'; and although A Flag for Sunrise is largely set in a fictitious Central American state, called Tecan, it also does so—albeit obliquely….

When critics have written of this novelist, they have tended to evoke Graham Greene and Conrad. Like Greene, Stone is an exponent of the thriller as parable; but, unlike Greene, he fails to ensure that his thrillers still have the solidity of granite when all their political and philosophical accretions have been stripped from them…. The comparison with Conrad also veers away from the mark. Admittedly both novelists are concerned with similar problems of honour, loyalty, freedom and government; but whereas Conrad fixed on them a stoically unblinking gaze, Mr Stone's queasy conscience perpetually causes him moral astigmatism.

But if, by the standards of these two writers...