[In the following review, Quinn claims that Damascus Gate contains flat language, too many plots and characters, and fails in its aspirations as a thriller.]

A great deal of profoundly fractured cerebration had gone down in Vietnam. People had been by turns Fascist mystics, Communist revolutionaries and junkies; at certain times, certain people had managed to be all three at once. It was the nature of the time. …

The above quotation from Robert Stone's A Flag for Sunrise (1977) can be read as a distillation of the skewed world-view, the disappointed politics and the spilt religiosity evident throughout the oeuvre of a novelist whose writing career began as a US Navy journalist, serving in what Don DeLillo has called “the first self-conscious war”. The—by turns—cynical, opportunistic, or sublimating shifts of allegiance, the implied relationship between ideology and addiction (and the profitable trade in both), even the conjuring of contradictory identities into a profane and precarious Trinity, are all familiar Stone motifs.

This “fractured cerebration”, forged in one conflict zone, is refined in another, pre-millennium Jerusalem in Stone's sixth novel, Damascus Gate. Here, we encounter, among the conflicted personae, an African-American Communist Sufi, a Jewish junkie Christian convert and a Catholic-Jewish-sceptic hero. That belief systems or behaviours so strikingly various can coexist “at once” has long been Stone's principal animating idea. It has figured most powerfully in his depiction of the cynicism of American foreign policy as felt in the field. In the typical Stone scenario, CIA machinations or illicit drug-trafficking, or both, bind the diverse together, into a connection (usually covert or narcotic) rather than a community. The only alternative is an existential loneliness, a void waiting vainly to be filled. Stone's narratives gape with what postmodern theology would call a God-Space.

Damascus Gate offers fertile territory for the author: a cast of damaged souls in a riven state, the world centre of spiritual longing, exploited by covert political interests. Raziel, a recovering addict, seizes on a fellow Jewish American, Adam De Kuff, as a potential messiah, on whose prophetic visions a new world religion, a faith of faiths, will be founded. Sonia, a black Sufi nightclub singer, is one of many eager to believe, to satisfy the cravings her Communism has failed to appease. This messianic plot is paralleled by another shadowy one, involving a plan to destroy the mosques on the Temple Mount, thereby allowing the rebuilding of the true Temple. As in a thriller, we are kept guessing who is really behind this conspiracy: Zionist zealots, an American New Right Church and secret-police factions are among those implicated.

Bringing together the two plot strands is another resident outsider, an American, Christopher Lucas. Internally divided, Lucas is a lapsed Catholic on his mother's side, Jewish on his father's. Like John Converse, the hero of Dog Soldiers (1973), the novel that made Stone's reputation, Lucas is a journalist, drawn to the city by a residual religious longing that his (inevitably) world-wearied scepticism cannot wholly extinguish. Lucas is professionally torn between two projects that, somewhat schematically, reveal Stone's secular/sacred division: investigating the beatings of Palestinian youths in the camps by a mysterious avenger, and researching a book on “Jerusalem Syndrome”, a term for those who feel drawn to the city by the will of God, and await imminent revelation of his purpose for them.

The idea of traffic, usually illegal, or illicit, between people and cultures, has long been a staple subject of Stone's. It allows him to develop his own variant of the paranoid perspective which also permeates the work of his contemporaries, Thomas Pynchon and DeLillo; whereas their deployment of the theme of paranoia has always been as much preoccupied with epistemological matters as with politics, Stone's particular emphasis on the conveyance of sinister traffic allows him to concentrate on matters of movement, speed and adventure (Stone is a former Beat fellow-traveller, who once went on the road with Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters, in the psychedelic bus driven by Neal Cassady). In his new book, however, he attempts to deepen the resonance of his favourite device. A more numinous sense of “traffic” is teasingly implied in earlier books like Dog Soldiers (“It's a Buddhist country. They must have a fantastic traffic in the transmigration of souls.”); but in Damascus Gate, where the spiritual is at the narrative core, the ultimate trafficker, we infer, is that god of border crossings and cross-cultural interpretations, Hermes. Tellingly, the bomb plot ultimately leads us to an underground chamber where a statue of a syncretic cousin presides.

Stone has discerned that ancient conflicts often hinge on textual matters, and he concerns himself with the importance of hermeneutics in descrying the links between rival faiths. He also implicitly suggests the dangers of syncretism as well as its promise; A Flag for Sunrise's idea of identities uneasily existing “at once” becomes here a quest for a credo able to subsume the many within the one, to put the fractured together again. Sonia, for example, thinks she has found it in the ancient texts: “The Sufis always knew it. And the Jews, in a certain way, always knew it, because that's what Torah is. It's a formula for making things one. For bringing us back where we belong.”

Making multifarious things one, however, is as much a recipe for reductionism, as it is an antidote for the world's ills. Stone is undoubtedly aware that, for all the exciting correspondences the syncretic method uncovers, it also does violence to historical and theological specificities. Thus, at one extreme, we get the scriptural omnivorousness of Raziel: “The Sufi, the Kabbalists, the saddhu, Francis of Assisi—it's all one. They all worshipped Ein-Sof. The Spanish Kabbalists derived the Trinity from Kabbala.” Despite the connections it generates, this notion aims to reduce to an essence, to erase difference. It is illuminating to compare Raziel's encompassing doctrine with the litany of hate issuing from Ian Percy, an Australian agronomist, in Dog Soldiers, whose mode of all-inclusive hostility can be read as a negative equivalent, a kind of counter-Torah: “As an engagé he hated the Viet Cong. He also hated the South Vietnamese and its armed forces, Americans and particularly the civilians, Buddhist monks, Catholics, the Cao Dai, the French and particularly Corsicans, the foreign press corps, the Australian government, and his employers past—and, most especially—present.” Lucas, however, is avowedly against the kind of generalizations that can yoke the diverse together, be it in negative or positive categories: “history was moronically pure, consisting entirely of singularities. Things had no moral. … Comparisons, attempts at ethical calibration, induced vital fatigue.”

One of the many disappointments of Damascus Gate is that it is guilty of its own kind of reductionism, and therefore unable to muster anything like the breadth of thought and expression its subject demands. Instead, we get journalistic paraphrase as the dominant stylistic mode; time and again, Lucas, our correspondent in Babel (appropriately a “religion major”), will dutifully fact-check a translation, bullet-point the details of some ancient complexity, chew at a cabbalistic bone of contention, or take a well-trodden tourist route towards guide-book revelation. What we invariably get is a report of a doctrine rather than an imaginative incorporation of its textual energies, stories or strategies in the novel itself: “In the afternoon, he drove out to the Hebrew University to see what he could find out about Ebionites and Clementine literature. … There was a single monograph in English, a summary that presented Christ as a Jewish Gnostic aeon who had appeared to Adam as a snake, and then to Moses. …” If, according to Ford Madox Ford, Conrad's ocean reeks overmuch of Roget's Thesaurus, then Stone stands even more revealed by the visible machinery of his research—most strikingly at a climactic moment when Lucas and friends sit down to an educative, summarizing slide-show. It is, also, a significantly static scenario for a writer who is far happier when the plot-wheels are turning faster. At such moments, the laureate of traffic seems hopelessly jammed.

Stone, despite his status, has never been a great literary stylist, but in earlier books his spare Hemingwayesque prose is sometimes stretched into a Beat-inflected lyricism. His work has never been particularly interested in the figurative, but Dog Soldiers, for example, describes realities so surreal they possess a charged symbolic power:

That winter, the Military Advisory Command, Vietnam, had decided that elephants were enemy agents because the NVA used them to carry things, and there had ensued a scene worthy of the “Ramayana”. Many-armed, hundred-headed MACV had sent forth steel-bodied flying insects to destroy his enemies, the elephants. All over the country, whooping sweating gunners descended from the cloud cover to stampede the herds and mow them down with 7.62-millimeter machine guns.

In Children of Light (1985), a novel in which Stone calculatedly moved away from the Catholic, Greenean, territory with which he had become associated, in order to interrogate the false religions of Hollywood, we again see evidence of a more audacious way with words, as for example, in the screenwriter Walker's description of his life work: “All those scripts … the record of petty arguments lost or won, half-assed stratagems and desperate compromises. A graph of meaningless motion like the tube-worm trails in a pre-historic seabed.”

The language of Damascus Gate is uniformly flat by comparison. Stone's authorial voice imparts information as baldly as his principal character; on the rare occasions a metaphor is employed, it is clumsy or predictable (“At just about the time oily black night commenced its descent on them, they ran clean out of road”). One of the more effective images, when Lucas gets inadvertently locked in the Holy Sepulchre during a vigil, describes “the flickering crack-house light of the church”. For a writer so preoccupied with the relations between religious and narcotic addiction, this is a highly appropriate metaphor; so appropriate, in fact, that we have already encountered it in the short story “Miserere,” included in the collection Bear and His Daughter (1997), where a Catholic convert and right-to-life activist arranges the blessing of four foetuses from an abortion clinic, and finds herself “in the crack-house flicker of that hideous, consecrated half-darkness”. To return to that story, however, is also to be reminded of an intensity of writing, a fluency of language, hardly echoed elsewhere in the 500 pages of Damascus Gate.

Characterization in the novel is also beset by shorthand and cliché: the latent Nazism of Lestrade, an archaeologist in the employ of the Christian House of the Galilean, is signified by a penchant for playing Orff and Wagner loudly in his quarters; in Sally Conners, Stone presents us with an English foreign correspondent whose strongest exclamation when learning of a bomb about to blow up the Temple Mount is “Crikey!” She is made to participate in exchanges like the following:

“Itbah al-Yahud?” asked the reporter. “What's that?”

“Don't you speak Arabic?” Lucas asked.

“I do somewhat,” Sally Conners said. “But I don't recall the phrase.”

Whatever her linguistic shortcomings, Sally is beautiful, like every female, from little girls to matrons, described here; these include Sonia, with whom Lucas falls in love, Nuala, an Irish revolutionary fatally embroiled in too many cross-plots; even Raziel's mother, mourning his drug-induced coma, is strikingly handsome. The affect of all this cumulative pulchritude is that many women read like one, or like versions of a type—a syncretic femininity. This straining after an essence is also evident in a preoccupation with music as master-art. Adam, Raziel and Sonia are all accomplished musicians, and the latter describes their mission as “making everything be music again … the way it was in the beginning”. Such harmony, however, threatens a democratic and distinctive noise. As Lucas says, “all the grief of the twentieth century has come from trying to turn life into art.”

Ultimately, Damascus Gate is itself guilty of aspiring to the condition of the airport blockbuster. Stone, like many successful writers, on both sides of the Atlantic, and for all the hermetic allusions in the novel, seems to be pursuing a peculiarly middlebrow alchemy: mingling journalism and pre-digested Big Ideas, seeking a saleable fusion of thriller and “literary novel”, providing metaphysics for the beach. Thus, despite the great promise of Jerusalem as a palimpsest city to be read and misread, despite the potential for a traffic in ideas and languages, as well as in the guns, drugs and conspiracies that regular readers know Stone will supply, we experience the texts of the city through the limited, journalistic mediation of Lucas (it is perhaps time to confine the Journalist-As-Hero to journalism), while the stones of the city serve most often as a mere backdrop for the formulaically star-crossed love of Lucas and Sonia. In the end, then, after all the expectations it sets up, Stone's Holy Land seems clouded by bad faith, and both the action-adventure set-pieces, the riots and pursuits, and the cerebration, fractured or otherwise, suffer accordingly.