[In the following review, Sutherland criticizes Stone for failing to acknowledge his debt to the documented true story of ill-fated sailor Donald Crowhurst in Outerbridge Reach, upon which the novel is apparently based.]

Robert Stone started writing relatively late in life and has accumulated his now considerable reputation slowly. His first published novel, A Hall of Mirrors, came out in 1967. A study of moral decay in New Orleans, it established Stone as a Catholic novelist of the Greenian, “why this is hell, nor am I out of it” mould. A Hall of Mirrors was filmed as WUSA in 1970, starring Paul Newman. The movie helped out Stone on the large cultural map and raised expectations for his second novel, Dog Soldiers (1974). Coinciding as it did with the dirty Peace with Honour years, Dog Soldiers projected a truly infernal vision of modern America. Taking as its starting-point national defeat in Vietnam (Stone had visited the war as a reporter in 1971), the novel showed an extraordinary inwardness with the seamy depths of American drug culture. It established Stone as a novelist of international stature.

Since Dog Soldiers, Stone's own career has taken a downward turn, as he has unsuccessfully sought scenarios that can bear the crushing weight of his spiritual despair. And Outerbridge Reach, his fifth novel, will not, I fear, arrest the decline. The story is easily summarized. A Donald Trump-like playboy resolves to compete in a round-the-world solo sailing race, to publicize a new line of yacht his firm has developed. There is a financial scandal, and the playboy-mariner goes to ground. His place in the race is taken by one of his firm's salesmen. Owen Browne is a veteran of Annapolis and Vietnam, happily married and clean-cut. But inwardly—as his closest friend perceives—he is a seething mass of spiritual discontent.

Browne's firm has recruited a filmmaker to record the voyage from shore. (This dual hero scheme—one who acts and one who watches—is recurrent in Stone's novels.) A decadent hipster, Ron Strickland made his reputation with a documentary satirizing American involvement in Vietnam. Browne's all plastic and fibreglass vessel fails its great test. As he founders in the South Atlantic, he decides to fake his voyage—on the grounds that the only truth at sea is the truth you make. He sabotages his transponder, compiles false logs, and marks time, intending to pick up his competitors on their way back and beat them to the finishing line. But, as he drifts in the empty ocean, religious mania overtakes him, and he walks off his boat having discovered, as he thinks, the secret of the universe. Meanwhile, back on shore, Strickland seduces Mrs Browne.

One can locate the origin of Outerbridge Reach in known features of Stone's past. He served in the US Navy, from 1955 to 58, and sailed to the Antarctic, which provides some of the vivid seascapes in the novel. He is now an enthusiastic yachtsman, as the full-page backplate of the bushy-bearded author at the wheel of his boat testifies. In the formative years in the late 1960s, before he embarked on fiction, Stone based himself mainly in London, as did other young Americans opposed to the war. This was the era of round-the-world sailing mania. In May 1967, Francis Chichester circumnavigated the globe single-handed. Feverish—and in retrospect childish—public excitement was fanned by newspapers, keen to boost circulation by sponsoring this newest manifestation of British pluck. In 1968, the Sunday Times announced a “Great Race” for solo circumnavigators. Posterity has generally forgotten who won the “Golden Globe” (Robin Knox-Johnston). But Donald Crowhurst, who spectacularly failed to win the race, is still legendary. Crowhurst's experimental trimaran failed him. He hid himself in the southern ocean, faked his logs, and intended to pick up the race on the homeward leg and win by fraud. But, in his loneliness, Crowhurst apparently succumbed to religious mania, and walked into the sea, convinced that he had discovered the secret of the universe.

In his foreword, Stone declares that “An episode in this book was suggested by an incident that actually occurred during a circumnavigation race in the mid-1960s. This novel is not a reflection on that incident but a fiction referring to the present day.” This is vague to the point of shiftiness. In its narrative outline and in many of its details, Outerbridge Reach matches exactly the last voyage and death of Donald Crowhurst. In itself, this derivativeness is not culpable. Fiction is forever rewriting history. But Crowhurst's story is not a matter of neutral record. It is not, so to speak, in the public domain. The story of Crowhurst's failure, deceptions and death was the outcome of brilliant detective work by two Sunday Times journalists, Nicholas Tomalin and Ron Hall. Their discovery (much of which was, and remains, hypothetical) was published as The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst (1970). For Stone not to mention Crowhurst is understandable; but not to credit the book which ingeniously reconstructed Crowhurst's story—a book on which Stone exclusively draws for the main matter of his novel—is churlish, to say the least. Stone's failure to credit his sources is the more surprising since he seems also to have woven elements of Tomalin's professional career (notably his scathing anti-Vietnam article, “The General goes Zapping Charlie Cong”) into the conception of Ron Strickland. At the end of the novel, Strickland is intending to make a “Strange Last Voyage” film. Tomalin was killed reporting in Israel in 1973. If nothing else, Stone's not entirely satisfactory novel may have the virtue of introducing a new generation of readers to his work.