Bay of Souls
Bay of Souls is the seventh published novel by American novelist Robert Stone. It was published in 2003. Plot summary Bay of Souls begins in the vein of James Dickey's Deliverance (1970), with the novel's central character Michael Ahearn, and his cronies hunting in the wilds of Minnesota. But Michael's attempts at Hemingwayesque role-playing are limited by his daydreaming, he brings a gun only to justify his presence out in the woods. While Michael waits in a deer stand, a strange hunter despairingly stumbles by, trying to haul a large buck on a pitifully inadequate wheelbarrow. Michael takes pleasure in the other man's humiliation, but the experience proves prophetic of several burdens assumed during the novel and the difficulty characters will have sustaining them. For instance, soon after the hunting incident, Michael's son Paul almost dies from exposure after searching for his dog in the snow. Then Michael's wife, Kristin, breaks her leg trying to carry her son home. After this trauma, Michael finds his relations with his wife deteriorating, and so he turns to the attentions of Lara Purcell, a professor of political science. A femme fatale with an interest in Caribbean voodoo, Lara leads Michael into high-stakes adultery, which includes erotic play with a gun and cocaine use. She has a murky background involving Soviet espionage and links to South American organized crime. Her devil-may-care attitude toward danger seduces Michael into trying to live out the literary vitalism that he has been studying in his literature class. Michael sleeps with Lara without Kristin's knowledge and then welcomes an opportunity to visit Lara's native island, St. Trinity, which is embroiled in its own civil war. When Lara asks, "Are you mine in the ranks of death?" Michael quickly assents. She can supply the kick and the danger missing from his life as a professor and a family man. Ostensibly, Lara must return to St. Trinity to sell off her stake in the Bay of Saints Hotel but also, given the voodoo religion practiced on the island, she has to preside over the transference of her deceased brother's soul from Guinee, a kind of underwater purgatory, to a place of honor. Additionally, Lara claims she needs to get her soul back because her brother's spirit gave it to a voodoo figure named Marinette, an older female spirit who lives under the sea. This semi-serious religious subtext calls into question all of Lara's motivations. Even though Michael does not fully admit it to himself, he knows that if Lara does not have a soul, then all of her seductive powers come from hidden agents that may have a whole different agenda than the one that Lara professes to have. As he reflects, if she does not have a soul, "then everything between us would be illusion." While Lara has no problem moving between midwestern academia and Third World intrigue, Michael has difficulty putting his theories into action. Once he arrives in St. Trinity separate from Lara (they have to take different