Millennium’s Pursuit

In Jerusalem’s uniqueness--its beauty, the tremors it raises in visitors of whatever faith or faithlessness and the nakedness of light and profile that mock its labyrinthine complexities--architecture is war by other means. Every stone is a metaphor in three millennial stories or, by now, as stories breed and divide, in rival versions of each of them: Jewish quarrels over the Sabbath, the Wailing Wall and who is a Jew, Christian sects disputing bits of the Holy Sepulchre roof, factional splits among the Palestinians.

The grandly suggestive conflictiveness of the place provides stretching room for Robert Stone, a writer whose power and whose urge to tackle large questions have sometimes forced their settings. In “Damascus Gate,” he has devised a dazzling assortment of conspiracies set Chinese box-like, one inside--or sometimes alongside--the other. Some are political, for large visionary or narrow tactical purposes. Others are religious, drawing on an assortment of fanaticisms.

Using or being used are a militant Jewish settlers’ underground, an ultra-Orthodox American rabbi, an American Christian fundamentalist group, an elderly would-be messiah, an armed Palestinian resistance cell and several mutually deniable levels of Israeli intelligence. For a dizzying variety of reasons, most of the conspiracies aim at blowing up--or seeming to blow up--that part of the sacred Muslim Haram that stands over remnants of the Jewish Second Temple.

The settlers’ group aims at provoking the Palestinians into full-scale revolt and subsequent elimination by the Israeli armed forces. The rabbi and his followers want to destroy the Muslim holy places in Jerusalem to make way for the building of the Third Temple. The American fundamentalists give discreet assistance, seeing the Third Temple as part of an apocalyptic process leading to the Second Coming and the conversion of the Jews.

The would-be messiah, a wealthy American musician, mixes mysticism and madness; he is manipulated by a former hippie with a drug habit, rich American parents and existential unease. As for Israeli intelligence, it has contacts with all of the above, as well as with the Palestinian underground group that it allows to operate for reasons of its own.

Into these conspiratorial schemes and passions, Stone introduces Lucas, a freelance journalist seeking stories to write and answers to his spiritual restlessness. He gets involved with the plots and plotters but less as actor than as witness and commentator. He is a latter-day American innocent abroad; another is Sonia, an African American singer with whom he falls in love. Sonia has been in Cuba and Somalia; she is an activist seeking illumination. She joins up for a while with De Kuff, the messianic visionary, and Razz, his handler, but extricates herself. Both she and Lucas brush up against what Stone calls the Jerusalem Syndrome, without quite catching it.

Syndrome is the author’s name for the passions that have sporadically seized individuals and groups in Jerusalem over the centuries. He includes national and ethnic fanaticisms, along with the prophetic visionaries imbued with cabalistic, gnostic and other doctrines that sprang up in opposition to more orthodox Jewish, Christian and Muslim teachings. In Stone’s vision, Jerusalem is a zone of ineradicable plague; people come from all over the world to catch it.

The swelling crowd that hears De Kuff preaching at the Bethesda Pool are mostly young foreigners; the disciples who follow him include “veterans of alien abductions, reincarnated priests of Isis.” The local mental hospital, explains the delightfully sane and cynical psychiatrist Dr. Obermann to Lucas, harbors “a Noah, a Samson, several John the Baptists and Jesuses returned and disappointed at their long-awaited receptions.”

The notion is suggestive though superficial; it does not stand up as anything like a large definition of what Jerusalem is. But it is wonderfully effective as an energy both to propel Stone’s story and to provide him a means of dramatizing the web of conspiracy and illusion that entangles anyone who seeks in a month, a year or a lifetime to penetrate what has been knotting itself up over 2,000 years.

Stone is a master of complexity and confusion. With all its characters, factions, plots, each with its own layers of concealment, it takes a while for “Damascus Gate” to set its stories in motion. Once it does, though, it is unsparingly exciting. We are never sure where we are as we follow Lucas through his chain of misunderstandings and misadventures.

It does not slow us down, quite the contrary. Stone tilts the ground on which we stand; helplessly we trot forward so as not to topple. After the Gaza Strip has been set ablaze, riots have swept Jerusalem and a device has gone off under the Temple Mount--what kind and what it accomplishes should not be revealed--the ending is a finely ironic shrinkage of a furiously expansive story.

There are any number of vivid scenes: a spooky night walk in the Old City when Lucas is accosted by two Arabs who lead him along by the hand, perhaps to kill him. Perhaps not; he is released but the perhaps remains. There are riots in Gaza, set off by one arm of the many-armed linkage of conspiracies. There is a brilliantly conceived conversation between an Israeli intelligence agent and the American rabbi whom, it appears, he is assisting in the bomb plot. The Israeli, a tough, sophisticated European and sometime terrorist, has nothing but contempt for the rabbi’s religious mania; his own purposes are hidden.

Stone’s finest portraits are of those too wise or cynical to catch the Syndrome. Besides the Israeli agent and Dr. Obermann, there are two saints, each of whom lives a life of dedication without a whiff of exaltation. One is Gross, who works tirelessly and dangerously to report and, where possible, prevent Israeli security abuses in the occupied territories. The other is Herzog, a Jew who has become a Catholic priest and insists on retaining his Israeli citizenship.

Lucas, half-Jewish and half-Catholic and exhilarated by the mystical buffet he has been gorging on, goes to Herzog hoping for some large spiritual advice to tie everything together. “I can’t give you a faith with Bodhisattva and the Kabbala and Our Lord,” the priest dryly replies. “No doubt in America there is one.”

Americans figure prominently among the Syndromers, and Stone has little use for what amounts to spiritual imperialism. There are the Messiah and his spoiled American handler--one mad, the other drugged-out--the bomb-financing rabbi from California, a sleek, well-financed Christian fundamentalist couple, an undercover agent from one of the Jewish settlements who acts as a provocateur in the Arab camps.

The weakness of the book is its one-sidedness, not moral or ethical but dramatic. Stone gives a lot of space to those who have caught the Jerusalem Syndrome. We hear them talk about their mystical visions, but the talk is windy and dumb.

It’s not that the author should admire them. It’s that he is unable to convey the power of what he sets up as overwhelming power. Still less does he convey its allure. A poisoned apple has to be an apple if it is to poison anyone. In his moral drama, Stone can do a Grand Inquisitor--such figures as Obermann, Gross, Herzog, the Israeli agent--but his Christs are soggy duds. The result is to make Sonia, who is a temporary convert to De Kuff’s teachings, and Lucas, who toys at great length with them, seem empty and lacking in anything much beyond good will.

On the other hand, if “Damascus Gate” fails as the religious thriller it aims, among other things, to be, it succeeds in those other things. It is a novel of springy action, a witty political thriller, an artfully lighted labyrinth of conspiracy and deception and a testing of Israel’s perilous razor edges.