“…adventures in the imagination of evil…shuffle the masks and bend the forms: befuddlement, complicity, inadvertence, dilettantism, irrationality…focus on private accommodations and betrayals against a background of public, almost abstract violence. “Firestorm tells the first-person story of a young man who, having flunked out of college, is given $1000 by his father and packed off to Europe with the injunction: ‘Come back a man.’ On a Turkish ship out of Piraeus bound for Port Said, he meets Carlos and Lillian, an American couple who appear to have toured the world in a mood of unrelieved ennui. Together, the three of them and a Paris-educated Senegalese travel south to the strife-torn Congo. There the narrator---perhaps for the first time in his life---manipulates events instead of a acquiescing in them; the riddle of Carlos and Lillian’s relationship is explained; and disaster ensues. “Mr. Rand insinuates his way into the reader’s confidence with a prose style that seems at first a collaboration between Hemingway and Salinger: lean, declarative sentences, each with an ironic tic. Then there are hints of other writers---Conrad, Graham Greene, the Saul Bellow of “Henderson the Rain King” --- almost as though the books Lillian reads on the journey signal each deepening complication. Light in August, Death in Venice, Death on the Installment Plan, Man’s Fate, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, The Idiot… “Finally, having left behind first the culture of ‘plastic articles and the sort of values people assume who must have values…where death happened to other people’; having then lost touch entirely with ‘the human establishment’; having descended into the heart of Africa, into a political fire, a dream of extinction-
