City of gods

Robert Stone's novel of faith, intrigue, and fanaticism in Jerusalem

Author: By Gail Caldwell, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, May 3, 1998

Page: E1

Section: Books

Jerusalem was the main place left to go for a man like this, and so ``Damascus Gate'' has about it the feel of literary predestination -- it's Stone at home in the garden of good and evil, immersed in every facet of grace and sophistry that awaits one in that city of cities. And he has made Jerusalem itself the star of the show: With its antiquities and passions, its labyrinths of gorgeous mayhem and bloody sacrifice, the place shimmers as ``a crazed congress of wonders,'' and Stone has mapped its interiors -- its unearthly chaos and psychic sovereignty -- with dazzling ambition. Drenched as it is in spiritual geography, ``Damascus Gate'' is demanding and sometimes desultory; it is not Stone's best novel, but it is a vastly intelligent one. Few writers can mask so many crucial ideas within the panorama of human folly, and Stone has done so here with a gang of lunatics and power brokers who make Wall Street seem like a one-horse town.

Faith is the cornerstone of ``Damascus Gate,'' its operative metaphor the sacking of the temple -- the destruction of one religious faith to guarantee the ascension of another. This diabolical relativism is manifest in competing plots to bomb holy sites in the city during the intifada, with American evangelicals colluding with an Israeli right-wing underground and pro-Palestinian forces supported by disaffected leftists spit out by the Cold War. Throw into this mix the color and nuance of Hasidism, Sufi mysticism, drug-tinged insight, and spiritual delusion, and you have a glimpse of the forces the novel conveys. It is a high-stakes game of scant restraint that nobody can win; God, unsurprisingly, has a slew of impostors who believe the match is theirs.

The requisite Stone protagonist who finds himself adrift in this wash of humanity is Christopher Lucas, a freelance journalist whose armor of alienation is as much an ID as are his press credentials. Half-Jewish, raised Catholic, desperate for and frightened by the tenets of each tradition, he is the modern sojourner so familiar to Stone's novels: Converse of ``Dog Soldiers,'' Holliwell of ``A Flag for Sunrise,'' Owen Browne of ``Outerbridge Reach.'' Agreeing to collaborate with a local psychiatrist on a book about the religious psychosis endemic to the area -- commonly known as the Jerusalem syndrome -- Lucas is soon face up against his own agnosticism. ``Are things better,'' he wonders, ``because we know the old stories that sustained us are lies?'' The answer, coming as it does through fathoms of grief and insight, is unsurprisingly complex and equivocal.

No promises, then, for either Lucas or us: no blue-eyed Jesus or Torah guarantees or anything certain beyond the passion of the search. What we are instead granted is a pilgrimage through the madness of the contemporary holy world: through the unhidden pain of Gaza, its only resource ``bad history on a metaphysical scale,'' through the stink of violence and the lightless irony of the fear and rage bred by religious fanaticism. Stone has created a band of memorable characters to populate this landscape: Adam De Kuff, a sweet manic-depressive from New Orleans who believes he's the Messiah, but doesn't much care; a reactionary Brit archeologist named Lestrade who plays Wagner at full blast and worries about his plants when the city is under siege. There's also a Scottish skinhead mercenary who's one of Stone's trademark evil nonchalants, and a former Jew for Jesus who has returned to the raptures of heroin. The Cold Warrior of the lot is an appropriately aloof Polish ex-communist named Zimmer; his political conviction is rivaled only by that of Nuala Rice, an Irish activist whose fearlessness takes her to Gaza and beyond. Lucas saves most of his attention for Sonia, a little Sufi jazz singer who has turned her back on her red-diaper past to find salvation through the music of the universe.

The plot of ``Damascus Gate'' is held together by Lucas and his fluid movements among this motley crew, who together comprise much of the political and religious zeal and contradiction of the ``raw holiness'' that is Jerusalem. The novel itself is a hallucinatory collage, reminiscent of Stone's first novel, ``A Hall of Mirrors,'' but suffused with the same world-weary intrigue of ``A Flag for Sunrise.'' A master of the urgent action scene, Stone is at his finest here when he's inside the dramatic volatility of Jerusalem and Gaza: a quasi-United Nations convoy caught in a riot; a drug-induced vision on a mountaintop; a terrified Lucas fleeing his murderous pursuers by hiding, somewhat absurdly, in a field of spinach. The darkly comic irrelevance of American privilege is not lost on this reporter, or on his creator: ``Working press'' has little impact in such an explosive world, except perhaps to target the messenger.

Oddly, ``Damascus Gate'' is being touted as a literary thriller, a misnomer that suggests something smaller than it is and focuses more on its narrative thrust than on its ideas. While the momentum of the novel occasionally suggests Stone bumping into John le Carre, the fact is that Stone set up most of this unyielding vision as a scaffolding for the tenets of faith: To feel the impact of the story's riotous events on its afflicted seekers, you have to be a willing student of the spiritual instruction Stone lays out in the first 100 pages. This can be heavy going, although it's hard to imagine a better teacher. Stone knows a staggering amount of theology and religious history, and he has tempered his stroll through the myriad architecture of God's place in the world with the assurances of art: parables from Scripture, his signature quotes from Shakespeare as well as Pascal and T. S. Eliot. As with the core of faith itself, these are not lessons for the faint of heart.

The intellectual passions of ``Damascus Gate'' are also what pave the way for its excesses: Too often, at least in the beginning, we are immersed in Gnostic mysticism, say, instead of the emotional interiors of character that Stone can do so well. The result is a sometimes arduous effort to get where we are going, or should be -- which is Stone's own voice relaying the darkest corridors of faith and longing. No other writer can capture so profoundly the human struggle for reason and mercy -- hallowed things, those -- in a world too lacking in both. When Stone locates that grail, as in Lucas's confrontation with his long-suffering ideas of God, all his early lessons in spiritual teachings fall away like so much extra homework.

This is occasionally a shockingly funny book, particularly if you like the idea of Woody Allen rumors surfacing in Jerusalem, or a fantasy of evangelical rapture being accompanied by one of the elect wearing plaid golf pants. And sometimes tender: Anyone who has an affinity for the wounded, wrenchingly aware characters of Stone's other fiction will feel a similar (if slighter) affection for Chris Lucas's tragic half-exile, for Nuala Rice's perilous bravery. Both have to envy the simpler allegiances of Sonia and De Kuff, who -- attendant to their own private madnesses -- know the real temple of holiness is in the heart. For the more earthly tethered, there is the great and terrifying Jerusalem, evoked here in all its effulgent splendor: a place where the strains of music in its ancient streets are eclipsed by the call to prayer, and where even the voice of God, in all its competing tones, can't outblast the sounds of suffering and hate.

And sometimes the entire field of folk seemed alien and hostile, driven by rages he could not comprehend, drunk on hopes he could not imagine. So he could make his way only through questioning, forever inquiring of wild-eyed obsessives the nature of their dreams, their assessment of themselves and their enemies, listening agreeably while they poured scorn on his ignorance and explained the all too obvious. When he wrote, it was for some reader like himself, a bastard, party to no covenants, promised nothing except the certainty of silence overhead, darkness around. Sometimes he had to face the simple fact that he had nothing and no one and try to remember when that had seemed a source of strength and perverse pride. Sometimes it came back for him.

ROBERT STONE

From ``Damascus Gate''