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''Dog Soldiers'' is a novel by Robert Stone, published by Houghton Mifflin in 1974. The story features American journalist John Converse, a Vietnam correspondent during the war, Merchant Marine sailor Ray Hicks, Converse's wife Marge, and their involvement in a heroin deal gone bad. It shared the 1975 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction with ''The Hair of Harold Roux'' by Thomas Williams (split award).〔 ("National Book Awards – 1975" ). National Book Foundation. Retrieved 2012-03-29. (With essays by Jessica Hagedorn and others (five) from the Awards 60-year anniversary blog.)〕〔 〕 and it was named by ''TIME'' magazine one of the 100 best English-language novels, 1923 to 2005. The book was adapted as a film from a script that Stone co-wrote., titled ''Who'll Stop the Rain'' (1978), starring Nick Nolte. ==Plot and Summary== ''Dog Soldiers'' deals with the fall of the counterculture in America, mistrust of authority figures, and the end of the optimism of the 1960s. Southern California (where the majority of the novel takes place) has moved on from the Summer of Love to post-Manson paranoia. Converse seeks inspiration for his next big play as a correspondent in Vietnam, but only finds the decline of morals in himself as well as the world. Symbolic of this moral corruption is his decision to traffic in heroin, which the 1960s counterculture never embraced as they did LSD. Converse involves his friend Hicks in the smuggling deal. He offers to pay Hicks to hide the heroin on the Merchant Marine vessel he works on when it ships from Vietnam to California, and then to deliver the dope to Converse's wife in Los Angeles upon arrival. The novel's primary complication unfolds when Hicks arrives in California and realizes he is being followed. Unsure of whether Converse has been double-crossed by his suppliers or Converse has himself betrayed him, Hicks elects to go on the run, taking along with him Marge, who is addicted to prescription painkillers and who had agreed with Converse to do the deal. Hicks—-a bit of a paranoid survivalist infatuated with Friedrich Nietzsche and martial arts with a bit of Zen Buddhism thrown in—-proves a formidable escapist, and the novel's action follows Converse and his suppliers' extended pursuit of Hicks and Marge. Marge would like to believe she has spent her youth as an advocate of freedom, both sexual and of speech, but inevitably discovers she is little more than an adulteress and a junkie. Antheil, their pursuer, may be interested in arresting them and getting the drugs off of the street, or killing them and keeping the swag for himself, but no one can tell for sure. The initial chapters portray South Vietnam as a decadent pit of death, mismanagement, and cheap thrills—essentially it is doomed to self-implode. The next several chapters show a detailed view of Hicks' life; once an all-American Marine, he is now wandering among the ruins of urban decay, longshoremen's bars converted to titty bars, and stumbling across all manner of perverts in Southern California. The final chapters build the character of "regulatory agent" Anthiel and his cohorts, but it is not clear until the end of the novel whether these are merely well-informed drug thieves or whether they are legitimately on the fringe of the law enforcement world. In the last few chapters of the book, Dieter, a German immigrant who stayed in the cliffs/desert where the wild parties and orgies of yesteryear are just ghostly memories, is introduced. At one point he asks Hicks to stay, to somehow kickstart the feeling of the sixties all over again, and Hicks replies that it's over. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Dog Soldiers (novel)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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