A Question of Faith

By Paul Gray

Inventing a terrorist conspiracy and then setting it in contemporary Jerusalem may seem a coals-to-Newcastle sort of enterprise. Why bother with make-believe when the reality is so vivid and convoluted? Robert Stone provides an engrossing answer in his sixth novel, Damascus Gate (Houghton Mifflin; 500 pages; $26). All of Stone's previous fiction has featured heroes whose problems are implicitly religious. Their pathologies--the heavy ingestion of drugs and booze, the habit of seeking or stumbling into serious, life-threatening trouble--stem from their uneasy sense that God still exists, but not for them. Damascus Gate makes this problem perfectly clear.

Christopher Lucas is an American journalist living in Jerusalem and looking for a story. He has quit his "comfortable and rather prestigious newspaper job" and now scrambles as a free-lancer. This job change has left him unsettled: "It was so hard to get it right, working without the assignment, the rubric, the refuge of a word count. No one behind you."

Another problem Lucas faces is that everyone he meets in Jerusalem asks him about his religion. The question troubles him because he can answer it only in the past tense: "My father was a nonpracticing Jew. My mother was a sentimental Catholic." What he has inherited from his parents continues to elude him.

Early in the story Lucas hears of Dr. Pinchas Obermann, who treats victims of the Jerusalem Syndrome. The journalist hears the term from a friend and asks, "Which is?" The reply: "Which is coming here and God gives you a mission. To Christians like your good self, only crazy ones." Lucas later meets Obermann and accompanies him on his rounds with his hospitalized patients: "They met some famous figures from Scripture. Noah was present, glancing uneasily at the smoggy sky. Samson, unbound but closely supervised in a room of his own, sneered at Lucas's philistine lack of conditioning."

This passage captures the ironic, skeptical attitude Lucas tries to maintain toward religious enthusiasms and mania. But he is also emotionally drawn to the subject. He starts research on a book about the Jerusalem Syndrome just as a dramatic instance of it--a plan, no less, to blow up the mosques on the Temple Mount--begins to engulf people he knows and eventually him as well.

Stone takes his time putting all the elements of an enormously complicated plot into place. Much religious arcana are offered: "How the Kabbalistic doctrine of ayin, the unknowable element in which the Infinite exists, had its Hindu cognate in the concept Nishkala Shiva, the remote absolute." Reading the first half of Damascus Gate can, at such moments, feel like a long uphill trek.

But the ride down the other side more than justifies the climb. Stone's skill at contriving apocalyptic conclusions was visible in his first novel, A Hall of Mirrors (1967), and he maintained this standard for more than three decades. Not even his dedicated readers will be able to foresee the twists and impact of this new novel. Damascus Gate is a transcendent thriller.

--By Paul Gray