Tales of adventure set in Africa, with their prefabricated plots and pasteboard heroes, have become so much the special preserve of hack novelists that the genre has been all but spoiled for serious writers. Philip Caputo's [Horn of Africa, a] story of African gun running and clandestine warfare, begins in such a conventional way that it took me a few more pages than it should have to realize that it is the genuine article: a real novel stuffed with excitement and filled with sharply drawn characters, written by a tough, sinewy writer who has something more important on his mind than finding a new tax shelter….

As is to be expected from the author of "A Rumor of War," the finest memoir of men at arms in our generation, the battle scenes are brilliant. Mr. Caputo knows the muddled horror as well as the shameful exhilaration of combat, and he has the skill to put you at the center of it and rub your nose in the stink of it.

More important, he knows how to create characters who fix themselves in your mind. (p. 12)

Except for Gage, whose only cause is to have none, each character constructs an elaborate rationale about why he is there. But the fact is, they all participate in a filthy little war because each of them needs something out of the conflict. Colfax needs a more important job better suited to his talents. Moody needs redemption for past sins. Gage merely needs to know what it is that truly frightens him. Nordstrand needs to do battle on the last empty space left on earth and fulfill his own vision of himself. Gage, who needs the least, survives best.

Dealing with scenes that are at once so banal and so grand is hellishly difficult for any writer. But Mr. Caputo—perhaps because this is his first novel and he may not know how hard a job it is—wades in and brings it off splendidly.

"Horn of Africa" is far from flawless; Mr. Caputo is still finding his way as a novelist. When he backtracks to give us Nordstrand's early history and show us a monster in the making, his powers recede to the merely ordinary, and sometimes less than ordinary. It is mostly a dose of pop psychology about an unhappy childhood illuminated by minor injustices—as if Raskolnikov were the product of a social worker's indifference. Mr. Caputo sometimes rushes in to drive home a point the reader is capable of getting without tutoring; but saying that he has written a book with some extremely rough patches is like complaining that Pete Rose overruns a base now and again. That is the way he plays the game and the source of his particular excellence. Philip Caputo has the talent to become a major American novelist. (p. 46)