[In the following review, Hynes contends that Damascus Gate is ambitious, powerful, and “Dickensian” in its scope.]

Robert Stone's reputation as a political novelist is something of an oversimplification. The practice of politics in his novels is almost always desperate, bloody and futile. And there has been a strong spiritual undercurrent to Stone's work; his first three novels each open with a scene between a lost soul of one sort or another and a Christian missionary. Almost all of his books conclude with a major character in a desolate place, stripped of all illusions under a merciless sky—the Nietzschean mercenary Hicks in Dog Soldiers, the morally compromised anthropologist Holliwell in A Flag for Sunrise, the crazed sailor Browne in Outerbridge Reach. Much of the action in his work might be described as characters searching for a meaning larger than political commitment, circling blindly around an aching hole where God ought to be.

The template for all such stories, of course, is the Bible, in which various prophets and indeed whole peoples have their souls laid bare in the desert. So perhaps it should not be so surprising that Stone's new novel, Damascus Gate, is set in Jerusalem and Gaza in 1992, during the fifth year of the intifada, the perfect place and time for inextricably combining politics and spirituality. The story centers on Christopher Lucas, an American journalist, the son of a Catholic mother and a Jewish father, and a quintessential Stone protagonist, possessed of “self-doubt, impatience, bad judgment, a sumptuary nature, a bald spot.” “I'm a religion major,” is Lucas's partially smartass response to the often-asked question, Are you a Jew?

On the prowl for a story, he decides to write about the Jerusalem Syndrome, a condition peculiar to devout foreigners in Jerusalem who believe they have a special mission, often a messianic one, from God. With the help of an Israeli psychiatrist, Lucas finds himself at the fringes of an apocalyptic cult led by a wealthy, deranged Louisianan named Adam de Kuff and his chief apostle and sometime Mephistopheles, Raziel Melker, a drug-addicted jazz musician and the son of an American senator. In following the cult's byzantine progress through the alliances and misalliances of Jerusalem's various religious communities—between fundamentalist Christians and Israeli settlers, between Israeli intelligence and Hamas—Lucas falls in love with one of the cult's devotees, Sonia Barnes, a Sufi jazz singer and relief worker who is the daughter of an African-American father and a Jewish mother, both communists. Eventually all of these characters—some willingly, some unknowingly—find themselves involved in a plot by right-wing Israelis to detonate a bomb under the Moslem mosque on the Temple Mount; the plot is led by Janusz Zimmer, a formerly Communist Polish journalist whose motives are not clear until the very end of the book.

This summary is only the bare bones of a plot of Dickensian complexity and coincidence. Damascus Gate is packed with a small army of secondary characters, violent incident, and, above all, brilliant talk, mostly about religion. There is very little exposition or scene-setting; this is not the sort of novel where the reader is provided with painstaking descriptions of geography and characters who patiently explain two thousand years of religious conflict. Right from the first pages, the experience is more like baptism by immersion, as Stone vividly evokes the deep religious passions and often murderous cultural complexity of contemporary Jerusalem. Readers may at first find this a bit dizzying, and the huge cast of characters hard to follow, but Stone's prose is taut and clean, and the narrative energy never flags. A great deal that is oblique or confusing is made completely clear in a masterfully orchestrated conclusion that features a riot, catacombs, and gunplay.

Damascus Gate is an astonishing performance, for a number of reasons. For one, at a stage in his career when many novelists are content to coast or indulge themselves, Stone has successfully carried off a wildly ambitious epic novel on a devilishly complicated subject. For another, there isn't the overwhelming sense of doom and grim futility that hangs over the conclusions of his earlier work, and for the first time a Stone protagonist does not utterly discredit and humiliate himself in the final pages. And finally, this is Stone's funniest book; while his characters have always been known for their gallows wit, this time the humor is built into the story itself, particularly into a climactic sequence that is as madcap as it is thrilling.

Yet for all that is new about this novel, it is just another leg of a spiritual journey that began with the opening pages of Stone's first book, A Hall of Mirrors, 30 years ago, a search for what he calls in the final pages of his latest novel “God in His absconding.” From the opening epigraph by Melville through the glimpse of a character reading Elaine Pagels's The Gnostic Gospels to its final invocation of God's “promised return, pretended return, promised messengers,” Damascus Gate is a stunning novel by a great American author, written with the energy and commitment of a first novelist but with all the skill and experience of a veteran. It brings to fruition 30 years of passionate inquiry into religion and politics, while finding the irony and black comedy in both.