Damascus Gate by Robert Stone

First published: 1998

Type of plot: Realism

Time of work: 1992

Locale: Israel, particularly Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, and Galilee

Principal Characters:

• Christopher Lucas, an expatriate American journalist and seeker after personal religious truth
• Sonia Barnes, a beautiful black nightclub singer, former communist, and Muslim mystic
• Adam DeKuff, a wealthy, highly unstable guru of the cult that Sonia follows
• Raziel Melcher, a heroin addict and jazz musician who promotes DeKuff in his messianic role
• Nuala Rice, an Irish worker with the International Children’s Foundation who stands at the center of several intrigues
• Janusz Zimmer, a soldier of fortune who expedites terrorist plots worldwide

The Novel

Damascus Gate, based on Robert Stone’s own religious quest, is set in Jerusalem, perhaps the most religious of the world’s cities. Extended research in the Yale University Divinity School library and seven prolonged visits to Jerusalem gave Stone the expertise in the Middle East that he needed to write the book. His participation in the early 1960’s California drug culture acquainted him with addictive personalities, insights that served him well in developing such characters as Raziel Melcher and Adam DeKuff.

The fervor of various religious cults and the hotbed of diverse political sects in Israel in the early 1990’s that Stone portrays may prove confusing for the average reader early in the book. Ostensibly, the novel is the saga of reporter Christopher Lucas, reared Catholic and Jewish but lately agnostic, who is in search not only of a news scoop in connection with his job but also of a personal faith with which he can live. He is collaborating on a book about the “Jerusalem Syndrome,” a peculiarly modern psychological disorder incurred by outsiders of any religious persuasion who believe that they have been appointed by God to come to the Holy City to accomplish a divine purpose. Various cults, messiahs, and Marys thus populate Jerusalem, adding to the chaos and frenzy of the scene.

Chris Lucas is also searching for love. Although he thinks about a former lover from time to time and has an affair with a British journalist at the end of the book, he has long carried a torch for Nuala Rice, an Irish smuggler of drugs and weapons. Lucas and Nuala have several friendly encounters during the course of the novel, but her sophistication, complexity, and hidden secrets place her romantically outside his grasp. In their politically charged last encounter, Nuala pretends she does not even know him. Lucas has more success in his romantic pursuit of the adventurous Sonia Barnes, a beautiful black jazz singer, onetime communist, and religious enthusiast who believes that the possibility of a long-term relationship between them hinges on Lucas’s conversion to her faith. Sonia’s closest friends, who accept and encourage her association with Lucas, are the volatile Raziel Melcher and the wealthy, manic-depressive Adam DeKuff, both Jewish Americans who feed each other’s religious fervor, stage pilgrimages and revivals, and anticipate the millennium.

The novel is also a well-crafted thriller of dangerous intrigue, conspiracy, and murder. The religious and political factions that antagonize one another begin to engage in the novel’s early section, set at the beginning of Holy Week, where Lucas observes a majnoon, or madman, shouting curses at tourists and behaving like a lunatic. The beauty and mystery of the holy places that Stone renders so vividly—Zion Gate, the Western Wall, Mount Hebron, Golan Heights, the Gaza Strip—clash with the violence, torture, and bloodshed that are also vividly rendered. Four characters are murdered in political skirmishes during the course of the novel. Another, a female companion whom Lucas and Sonia fear may betray them, is knocked unconscious by Sonia when she goes berserk. Lucas is interrogated and brutalized in a harrowing episode toward the end of the novel.

The book’s final hundred pages are a frenetic race against time, as Lucas and Sonia separately try to find and detonate the bomb that they think Raziel, under the influence of drugs, may have planted. There may also have been more than one bomb plot. At least one bomb turns out to have been bogus, a fake explosion staged by Janusz Zimmer and his mercenaries to thwart the real bombers. What really does and does not happen is not resolved. In the uneasy denouement, DeKuff has become thoroughly delusional and is stoned by a mob of outraged Palestinians, Raziel has become comatose, and Zimmer boards a plane and heads for political intrigue in another country. Lucas and Sonia profess their love for each other but part ways because they know that their relationship will never work.

The Characters

Stone constructs sharp, fascinating characters. Contributing to the immediacy of the human action he portrays is the fact that Stone himself experienced some of the violence that his characters do. While visiting Israel and the occupied territories during the height of the intifada, the Palestinian uprising, Stone and his wife were themselves caught up in a riot while riding in company with a United Nations official. They saw smoke and tear gas, heard men shouting and women ululating, and observed a boy with a fatal head wound being carried away on the shoulders of his friends. Lucas, Sonia, and their friends take the same ride and experience the same frenzy and atrocity.

Stone uses spare but meaningful detail in his characterization. His hero, Chris Lucas, is, like most Stone protagonists, a weak and flawed man, a searcher, an outsider. Had he been more sure of himself, he would have opted to follow the trail of the more volatile story in the Gaza Strip that he rejects, though his research on religious mania brings him into just as much danger. Lucas broods, is restless and rootless, and has difficulty committing to anything. The two main women in the story, Sonia and Nuala, are passionate, independent, strong-willed, and elusive. Lucas seeks to possess them both but fails. Sonia opts not for a life with Lucas but for a life of poverty, social action, and human rights work in a Third World country; they both know that Lucas requires more security and comfort than she does. Sonia simply and forthrightly decides to embrace fanatical religion, tries to convert Lucas, and gives up both efforts when she sees that they are ineffectual. Lucas seems incapable of committing to any belief system, and the novel ends with him as religiously confused as when it began. Nuala not only rejects any romantic passes from Lucas but also pretends at one point that they are strangers; she finally and permanently eludes him by being captured and hanged.

Critical Context

Damascus Gate is Stone’s seventh published book, following five novels and a collection of short stories. He tends to set his books in locales that are exotic, war-torn, or both, and his characters are typically lost, weak, or desperate, in search of something that eludes them. Stone’s first novel, A Hall of Mirrors (1967), is set in New Orleans, a city of masquerades, hustlers, secret passages, and mysterious cults that resembles the Jerusalem of Damascus Gate. A Flag for Sunrise (1981), Stone’s third novel, is set in war-ravaged Nicaragua and focuses, as Damascus Gate does, on a detached outsider who is trying to grapple with forces and people beyond his understanding. Dog Soldiers (1974), set in Vietnam, prefigures the drug smuggling and political betrayals of Damascus Gate.

Stone’s work also contains echoes of other writers. Outerbridge Reach (1992) features a rootless, deluded character who is swallowed by the sea during a solo circumnavigation of the world; it echoes such great sea stories as Herman Melville’s Moby Dick: Or, The Whale (1851), Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim (1900), and Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea (1952). Stone has commented that he learned how to write a novel from the work of Conrad, whom he accounts his greatest teacher, and how to construct multidimensional characters with intersecting parallel lives from the work of John Dos Passos. In its emphasis on the high costs of adhering to social, religious, and political ideals, Stone’s work has been compared to that of Chinua Achebe, particularly Anthills of the Savannah (1987). In its violent and darkly powerful religious sensibility, it has been compared to the short stories of Flannery O’Connor. Borrowing an epigraph from Herman Melville’s tortuous philosophical epic poem, Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876), Damascus Gate also resonates with Clarel in its angst-ridden hero’s wandering through the Holy Land accompanied by pilgrims who advance passionate belief systems.

Stone’s novels have commanded both critical and commercial success. Dog Soldiers, Stone’s novel about Vietnam, won the 1974 National Book Award and was produced as the 1978 motion picture Who’ll Stop the Rain. A Hall of Mirrors received a Faulkner Foundation Award and enjoyed a less successful film adaptation.

Bibliography

Commonweal. CXXV, June 5, 1998, p. 24.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. May 17, 1998, p. 2.

The Nation. CCLXVI, May 11, 1998, p. 50.

The New Republic. CCXVIII, May 25, 1998, p. 29.

The New York Times Book Review. CIII, April 26, 1998, p. 14.

The New Yorker. LXXIV, April 13, 1998, p. 74.

Parks, John G. “Unfit Survivors: The Failed and Lost Pilgrims in the Fiction of Robert Stone.” CEA Critic 53, no. 1 (1990): 52-57. Though this essay predates Damascus Gate, it explores in detail the kind of heroes Stone creates, protagonists that anticipate Christopher Lucas.

Publishers Weekly. CCXLV, February 16, 1998, p. 200.

Ruas, Charles. “Robert Stone.” In Conversations with American Writers, edited by Charles Ruas. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985. In this interview, which took place following the publication of Stone’s third novel, A Flag for Sunrise, Ruas suggests that Stone’s method is to challenge and provoke the reader into exploring large issues of identity and behavior, and thus the moral and spiritual fiber of society.

Solotaroff, Robert. Robert Stone. New York: Twayne, 1994. A book-length study of Stone. Examines Stone’s five novels that predate Damascus Gate and devotes a chapter to his stories and nonfiction. The chronology of Stone’s life and the select bibliography are both useful sources.

Stone, Robert. “Jerusalem Has No Past.” The New York Times Magazine (May 3, 1998): 55-56. A thoughtful and succinct statement by Stone on the complex religious and political factions in Jerusalem, with a tentative prediction of what lies ahead. Excellent, even indispensable background for approaching Damascus Gate.

Time. CLI, May 25, 1998, p. 82.

The Wall Street Journal. April 24, 1998, p. W4.

The Washington Post Book World. XXVIII, May 3, 1998, p. 1.