A Flag for Sunrise is too long and badly paced. In part, this arises from the understandable difficulties of inventing and populating a foreign land. Less excusable, however, is the constant intrusion of the author's "ideas," which bloat the narrative and slow the book's pace. There are too many "flags" here, too many gaudy symbols and concepts run up the pole, trumpets blaring, by an author hell-bent on being taken seriously. In particular, the bogus, boozy philosophizing that was the one real weakness of Dog Soldiers runs rampant in Tecan. Everyone from priest to spy, from anthropologist to hired heavy, has his self-conscious and long-winded say about the state of the world and human nature, ending too often with fatuous comments like, "Everyone does for themselves finally." Or: "I get the joke now … We're all the joke. We're the joke on one another. It's our nature." This is...