In Refiner's Fire, Mark Helprin makes his adventurer several sizes larger than life and eschews realism for a prose charged with romantic extravagances and purple rhetoric: as if The Odyssey had been updated and rewritten by Dylan Thomas in his less sober moments. While still a schoolboy, Marshall Pearl hunts down Rastafarian brigands in the Jamaican jungle, outshooting professional soldiers. He sails and even swims through a hurricane, makes 'perfect love' to 'the most beautiful woman he had ever seen', and as a recruit in the Israeli army shows a grasp of strategy that could have put Dayan out of business.

Occasionally, Helprin's imagery is strikingly apt. Pearl's Harvard contemporaries 'spoke with a's so flat that they could slide them under doors'. Too often, he lurches haphazardly from simile to simile and metaphor to metaphor, obscuring where he should be clarifying. In Brindisi harbour, 'miscellaneous unkempt craft … nestle against a cruiser or a minesweeper, not quite in the manner of a calf leaning on its mother but rather like the flies which settled on carcasses in the horse butcheries.' Which were they like, calves or flies? Or 'not quite' like either? When in doubt, leave out, Mr Helprin. Refiner's Fire is partly redeemed by the account of the build-up to the Yom Kippur war and of the first few days' fighting on the Golan Heights, in which the author disciplines himself to let his story come before his verbal excesses; but even that is spoiled by a melodramatic, back-from-the-dead epilogue in Hospital 10. (p. 223)