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Damascus Gate
On the cusp of the millennium, Jerusalem has become a battleground in the race for redemption. American journalist Christopher Lucas is investigating religious fanatics when he discovers a plot to bomb the sacred Temple Mount. A violent confrontation in the Gaza Strip, a race through riot-filled streets, a cat-and-mouse game in an underground maze—as Lucas follows his leads, he uncovers an attempt to seize political advantage that reveals duplicity and depravity on all sides of Jerusalem’s sacred struggle.
Ambitious, passionate, darkly comic, Damascus Gate is not only Robert Stone’s biggest and best novel to date, but a timely and brilliant story of belief, power, salvation, and apocalypse.
Ambitious, passionate, darkly comic, Damascus Gate is not only Robert Stone’s biggest and best novel to date, but a timely and brilliant story of belief, power, salvation, and apocalypse.
528 pages, Paperback
First published May 14, 1998
78 people are currently reading
1041 people want to read
About the author
Robert Stone
30 books250 followersROBERT STONE was the author of seven novels: A Hall of Mirrors, Dog Soldiers (winner of the National Book Award), A Flag for Sunrise, Children of Light, Outerbridge Reach, Damascus Gate, and Bay of Souls. His story collection, Bear and His Daughter, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and his memoir, Prime Green, was published in 2006.
His work was typically characterized by psychological complexity, political concerns, and dark humor.
A lifelong adventurer who in his 20s befriended Ken Kesey, Neal Cassady, and what he called ‘‘all those crazies’’ of the counterculture, Mr. Stone had a fateful affinity for outsiders, especially those who brought hard times on themselves. Starting with the 1966 novel ‘‘A Hall of Mirrors,’’ Mr. Stone set his stories everywhere from the American South to the Far East. He was a master of making art out of his character’s follies, whether the adulterous teacher in ‘‘Death of the Black-Haired Girl,’’ the fraudulent seafarer in ‘‘Outerbridge Reach,’’ or the besieged journalist in ‘‘Dog Soldiers,’’ winner of the National Book Award in 1975.
His work was typically characterized by psychological complexity, political concerns, and dark humor.
A lifelong adventurer who in his 20s befriended Ken Kesey, Neal Cassady, and what he called ‘‘all those crazies’’ of the counterculture, Mr. Stone had a fateful affinity for outsiders, especially those who brought hard times on themselves. Starting with the 1966 novel ‘‘A Hall of Mirrors,’’ Mr. Stone set his stories everywhere from the American South to the Far East. He was a master of making art out of his character’s follies, whether the adulterous teacher in ‘‘Death of the Black-Haired Girl,’’ the fraudulent seafarer in ‘‘Outerbridge Reach,’’ or the besieged journalist in ‘‘Dog Soldiers,’’ winner of the National Book Award in 1975.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 120 reviews
June 8, 2025
The religious fanatic characters’ ability to mash up many areas of religious belief into a self-styled “system” here is both fascinating and wackadoodle. Amid this, orthodoxy is sidelined.
This gobbledygook is meant to say that these fanatics are beyond the pale, I understand that. Yet it’s still so many incomprehensible pages one has to read! — and it’s a bore.
I wonder if there is someone somewhere who might be able to understand the religious “thinking” author Stone puts us through. It isn’t me, that’s for sure. And what’s the point for the average reader? Was it a challenge to himself artistically? That’s a legitimate end. But I suspect for 95% of readers it is impenetrable. Like Finnegans Wake in that respect.
In his last novel, Inside Story, Martin Amis gives instructions for writing. He says, among other things: "Don't be baffling and indigestible." Well, that's what Stone does in this book. He is baffling and indigestible. He is in short, unreadable.
I’d love to see a critical reading of this book by the religious scholar Elaine Pagles.
It’s for this reason that I stopped reading at page 158.
This gobbledygook is meant to say that these fanatics are beyond the pale, I understand that. Yet it’s still so many incomprehensible pages one has to read! — and it’s a bore.
I wonder if there is someone somewhere who might be able to understand the religious “thinking” author Stone puts us through. It isn’t me, that’s for sure. And what’s the point for the average reader? Was it a challenge to himself artistically? That’s a legitimate end. But I suspect for 95% of readers it is impenetrable. Like Finnegans Wake in that respect.
In his last novel, Inside Story, Martin Amis gives instructions for writing. He says, among other things: "Don't be baffling and indigestible." Well, that's what Stone does in this book. He is baffling and indigestible. He is in short, unreadable.
I’d love to see a critical reading of this book by the religious scholar Elaine Pagles.
It’s for this reason that I stopped reading at page 158.
November 2, 2008
An intense novel that portrays politics in Jerusalem. In this tale, extremists of both the Christian and Jewish persuasion are involved in a plot to destroy the Temple of the Mount. The main character is an American writer. Colorful local and international characters abound. Sonia is an NGO type, looking to do the right thing throughout the world. A rabbid American fundamentalist young man thinks he has found the Messiah and tries to establish him. Plots whirl within plots and it is tough to figure out who is betraying whom and for what reason. It is a very interesting read, but it can be a bit tough to follow. With that caveat, it is recommended.
December 7, 2014
The seeds of an excellent thriller are contained in this book. The author, however falls into several book-killing traps. In writing this story about the Middle East, he begins by describing each setting as if he were writing a descriptive travelogue- type book and knocks the reader over with so much detail, the heart of the story is immediately obscured. Then he bogs the reader down in esoteric religious myths, writings and tropes which are far too particular to add to the story he's attempting to tell. And he's slightly overfond of words not in common usage. So by the time I got to the assertion that Masada may in fact have been a whole other story, I was too worn down by what morphs into tedium to care. But he is on to something here and so I read the book. A strong editor may have helped. But unless Hollywood gets to it and strips away the excesses, this book may never find a fair-sized audience. When I am rooting for Hollywood to rescue a story, you can bet that something fundamental went way off the rails.
January 4, 2013
A novel of uncommon ambition and density. It's odd to see this labeled as a thriller. It's not, even though it does have elements of one. Those narrative elements are functional enough, but not the main attraction. The story is internal, not external.
Stone is interested in the headspace of his flawed characters as they seek enlightenment, tip over into religious mania, crash head-on with reality. Sections of the novel have a hallucinatory intensity. It's all beautifully done, giving insight into the religious urge.
A truly compelling work that refuses to give easy answers.
Stone is interested in the headspace of his flawed characters as they seek enlightenment, tip over into religious mania, crash head-on with reality. Sections of the novel have a hallucinatory intensity. It's all beautifully done, giving insight into the religious urge.
A truly compelling work that refuses to give easy answers.
December 8, 2017
After watching an absolute chilling old documentary on Christian Zionists, called Waiting for Armageddon, I realized that I had never written a review on this wonderful novel that I read two years ago. The Christian Zionists scare the hell out of me. They believe that the end of days will happen when 1) Jerusalem reverts back to the Jewish people 2) The Jewish people then rebuild the temple (removing the mosque) and 3) Those same jewish people convert to Christianity (and those who don't "perish"). Seriously, they are incredibly scary. And their believers have included Christopher Columbus and some of the early pilgrims that came to the American colonies. The documentary is chilling but Robert Stone's novel explores how utterly dangerous these people are in terms of the massive amount of money they send to Israel. Stone depicts a very cynical Israeli government that accepts there money, knowing full well that 3) conversion doesn't really work for them though! The book is a thriller as its plot involves one of the nutty scenarios contained in the documentary --involving terrorism to blow up al-Aqsa mosque.
Stone was a great novelists and his characters are perhaps the main draw to the novel. Very unusual people who probably belong more in the 1960s and 1970s--in search of meaning. Because they are deeply flawed it is in a way painful to read about them.
Most people would love the details of the city and Jewish spirituality. Great book that I am going to reread.
I also recommend Allies for Armageddon and Forcing the Hand of God. Scary stuff.
Stone was a great novelists and his characters are perhaps the main draw to the novel. Very unusual people who probably belong more in the 1960s and 1970s--in search of meaning. Because they are deeply flawed it is in a way painful to read about them.
Most people would love the details of the city and Jewish spirituality. Great book that I am going to reread.
I also recommend Allies for Armageddon and Forcing the Hand of God. Scary stuff.
January 13, 2019
I don't know of anybody who's writing novels like this anymore, big, meaty, messy things that combine history, politics, and religion with tense plots and compelling characters. Like Graham Greene on steroids. I'm a big Stone fan, and while I enjoyed this book slightly less than A Flag for Sunrise, it still stands head and shoulders above most of the wispy, precious, overwritten but under- thought novels that are in vogue. In a nutshell, this book is about a burned-out journalist uncovering a bombing plot in '90s Jerusalem. Along the way he encounters religious fanatics, terrorists of all stripes, and various double-dealing political types. I've never been to Israel, but the picture he paints of the country, especially Jerusalem, is scary and fascinating. An ancient hotbed of intrigue, skullduggery, and mania. Everybody's got an angle, a scam, or a conviction that leads them to do awful things. The descriptions of the city are gorgeous, the tidbits about various Christian and Jewish sects and cults fascinating (I was constantly going to Wikipedia for more info), and the plot, once it builds, moves along with some fantastic set pieces, particularly one set in a Palestinian refugee camp on the Gaza Strip. Maybe people don't want to read novels like this anymore. I wish they did, because then maybe more people would write them.
April 9, 2015
The story had a lot of potential, but was ultimately disappointing. The plot moved slowly, although there were some great scenes. Ultimately, I did not find the characters the least bit sympathetic or compelling. So as a reader you're left following a somewhat meandering plot involving characters you don't care about. Stone's descriptions of Jersusalem, Israel, and Gaza were great, however. The action in the strip was page-turning. As someone who has travelled to the Middle East and North Africa his descriptions of the crowds, mob violence, and the uncomfortable feeling one gets among a hostile crowd is spot on. This was a chore to get through, and one of the few books I had to convince myself to finish. Not recommended.
October 6, 2015
An intelligent and informative look at the different peoples and factions struggling for ascendancy in Israel, centered around the ancient, holy places of Jerusalem and set in the time of the intifada of the early 1990s, as two half-Jewish American settlers find themselves embroiled in some End of Days shenanigans.
Chris Lucas, a religiously interested yet cynical reporter straight out of "Greeneland", researches a book on the Jerusalem Syndrome. Sonia Barnes, singer, aid worker and daughter of communist parents, becomes attached to a new cult combining aspects of all the major religions into one faith, signified by the ouroboros, the snake that swallows its own mouth.
The two main characters, veterans of wars in South America and Africa, have been drawn to Jerusalem due to their background and faith. In Jerusalem, religion, money, and the symbolic power of the ancient holy sites pervade all relationships and organisations.
The plot centers around hints of a collaboration between American fundamentalists and Jewish extremists to rebuild the temple of Solomon on Temple Mount, a cause fronted as a shadowy set-up called the House of the Galilean.
However, this is one of those stories where nothing is quite as it seems, but either more or less so.
Jerusalem always intrigues me - how can it not? - and Stone has produced an even-handed and illuminating account of the motives of those who fight for its soil and soul.
He also writes very well, as in this example, where Lucas has just visited both Yad Vashem (the Jewish museum to the Holocaust) & the Gaza strip: "Blind champions would forever turn the wheels in endless cycles of outrage and redress, an infinite round of guilt and grief. Inside of justice, a circular darkness".
Reading Damascus Gate entertained me, and left me more convinced than I already was that Jerusalem is a lit match searching for a fuse.
Chris Lucas, a religiously interested yet cynical reporter straight out of "Greeneland", researches a book on the Jerusalem Syndrome. Sonia Barnes, singer, aid worker and daughter of communist parents, becomes attached to a new cult combining aspects of all the major religions into one faith, signified by the ouroboros, the snake that swallows its own mouth.
The two main characters, veterans of wars in South America and Africa, have been drawn to Jerusalem due to their background and faith. In Jerusalem, religion, money, and the symbolic power of the ancient holy sites pervade all relationships and organisations.
The plot centers around hints of a collaboration between American fundamentalists and Jewish extremists to rebuild the temple of Solomon on Temple Mount, a cause fronted as a shadowy set-up called the House of the Galilean.
However, this is one of those stories where nothing is quite as it seems, but either more or less so.
Jerusalem always intrigues me - how can it not? - and Stone has produced an even-handed and illuminating account of the motives of those who fight for its soil and soul.
He also writes very well, as in this example, where Lucas has just visited both Yad Vashem (the Jewish museum to the Holocaust) & the Gaza strip: "Blind champions would forever turn the wheels in endless cycles of outrage and redress, an infinite round of guilt and grief. Inside of justice, a circular darkness".
Reading Damascus Gate entertained me, and left me more convinced than I already was that Jerusalem is a lit match searching for a fuse.
unfinished
August 10, 2011I picked this up for a dollar at a used bookstore, and really wanted to read it, but it just didn't hold my attention. Maybe I'll try again another time.
June 27, 2021
God awful. Would rather swan dive off my apartment building than reread it
July 9, 2020
Damascus Gate ss psychological; it's full of interesting and wide-ranging characters, some who walk the line between madness and divine connection; it's political; it's moral; it explores the mystical aspects of the religions of the middle East. It was written in the mid-90's heading toward the Millennium when many fundamentalist groups were looking toward the Apocalypse and the Rapture, and many also wished to hasten it on, providing the novel's tension and adventure. There's a close-hand look at the conflict in Israel-Palestine from all perspectives. I liked the book a lot. There was a wildness to the narrative that sometimes left me breathless, but also sometimes spun out of control in a disturbing (to me) way. But shouldn't good, serious fiction disturb us? I think so.
August 14, 2020
I've long been a fan of Robert Stone's work. Damascus Gate represents a slight but welcome departure. It is deeply literary (I had to keep a dictionary nearby) but also a thriller of the first order. And a thriller that leaves one thinking about large issues. It took me a while to get into the flow of the book, but once the hook was set I couldn't put it down.
July 18, 2013
Damascus Gate is an unusual great novel because the constellation of characters who variously serve as its protagonists are comparatively uncompelling individual actors. The desultory freelance journalist Christopher Lucas; the half-Jewish, half-black, Communist true-believer and jazz singer Sonia Barnes; Raziel the polymath musician, former Yeshiva-boy genius, former Jew for Jesus; even the inspired and psychologically troubled Adam De Kuff whose Messianic vision drives some of the most interesting and redemptive moments in the narrative: all are dwarfed by the forces of history and religion that determine action and reaction throughout Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip, and shape the thoughts and desires of every character living in those places and involved in the events that unfold there. Each plays his or her part in a sprawling tragic drama that claims many lives before it temporarily resolves itself--in an endgame revelation of behind-the-scenes duplicity worthy of Le Carré--as a farcical conspiracy designed to serve secular political expedience.
The story's most engaging questions are where (or when; or whether) authentic experience blends into its counterfeit and how one is to distinguish between the genuine and its semblance. This distinction applies to religious faith and sectarian play-acting; ideological commitment and political posturing; a friend and a convenient acquaintance; love and something else. It would be exciting, for example, to read Adam De Kuff as the latest incarnation of the Messiah, yet one recognizes (thanks to the clarifying commentary of his psychiatrist, Dr. Obermann) that De Kuff is psychologically fragile and his Messianic convictions mere fantasies generated by manic-depression. Thus, De Kuff is deluded--or is he? Maybe his psychiatrist, Pinchas Obermann, is a pseudo-scientific materialist incapable of perceiving the Divine Soul immanent in a disheveled, broken-down old man. At this point, the reader might recall Peter Shaffer's brilliant play, Equus, in which an adolescent boy's savage, aberrant love of horses prompts his doctor to question whether a normal psychological state is desirable if it cancels or precludes intense, transformative emotion: that is, ecstasy. If to be psychologically "normal" is to live a life that is dead to powerful emotion, is it not preferable to forsake the "normal" and pursue the unruly, free, all-consuming, mind/body/soul orgasmic experience? Lacking such intense emotion, is a person truly alive, truly human?
Ecstasy, however, is dangerous. In Equus, the boy's love is a confused amalgam of the religious and the erotic, a volatile psycho-emotional construction created almost by chance, that causes shame and precipitates a bloody atrocity. De Kuff's manic delusions prompt him to preach what many might wish to believe--that all faiths, all beliefs, all versions of the Abrahamic God are one--and what many others consider blasphemy. De Kuff's syncretistic pronouncements attract followers and, ultimately, precipitate a street fight that kills him and puts his chief disciple and sedulous handler, Raziel Melker, in a coma. Has Raziel really believed De Kuff to be the Messiah? Has his touting De Kuff to Sonia as the herald of a new existence been the latest chapter of revealed religion born of genuine belief? Is Raziel's destruction by an intolerant mob an authentic martyrdom earned and confirmed by this belief? Is De Kuff's? Or has Raziel just been egging-on a crazy old man and "selling" him as the Messiah merely as part of a private amusement or promiscuous con? After all, De Kuff's independent wealth finances not only his itinerant preaching but also Raziel's heroin habit. Did Raziel ever truly believe the old man's assertion that "Everything is Torah" and his further claims of spiritual oneness? Or has he merely feigned belief to win De Kuff's trust and lend legitimacy and excitement to the provocations he, Raziel, seems to enjoy enacting in the faces of all true believers, Christian, Muslim, and Jew?
Any reader's understanding of the novel can prosper from asking such questions about most of what is done and said in it. Also worth considering in this light is the character of Christopher Lucas, the American journalist who is resident in Jerusalem and nominally working on a feature story about "Jerusalem Syndrome"--a tendency for certain, perhaps especially susceptible or impressionable, visitors to the city to conceive an evolving sense that they have been chosen to act out or facilitate some highly significant, even miraculous event in the service of one religion or another. Although we may take Lucas's interest in Jerusalem Syndrome at face value, we also may wonder why he settles on this story when so many others--more urgent, more violent, more "glamorous"--seem to press on his attention. Foregoing the construction of a meta-fictional mirroring that would read the text of Damascus Gate (or large portions of it) as an unmediated, unedited version of the feature piece Lucas might eventually write (I am thinking particularly, of course, of the sections that focus on Raziel and De Kuff), we recognize pretty quickly that Lucas's interest in Jerusalem's diverse and disparate seekers is a simple displacement of his interest in himself.
Half-Christian, half-Jew, Lucas admits to being undecided about his identity and the nature of his belief, or even if he has any. He haunts Jerusalem, in part, to (re)discover who he is and might become, what he might believe, and why. In the course of investigating Jerusalem Syndrome, he canvasses local figures, like Dr. Obermann and the U.S. Counsel, Sylvia Chin, as well as intriguing (and obviously dangerous) foreigners like Nuala Rice and Janusz Zimmer (more of him later), who obviously know something about the phenomenon even if they do not call it by its somewhat tendentious name. In the process of doing his journalistic legwork, Lucas gets caught up in those very impersonal and indiscriminately destructive forces of religion and history whose psychological effects he is attempting to document and interpret. Discovering how these forces so easily deny personal agency to everyone who tries to think and act outside or apart from their respective contexts, Lucas almost gets himself killed.
A poorly-planned, chaotic excursion to the Gaza Strip, instigated by Nuala Rice and, with a separate agenda, Linda Erickson, ends with the murder (also by mob violence) of a young man, Hal Morris, who is acting under the alias "Lenny" at the behest of Janusz Zimmer and in confederacy with Erickson (formerly the wife of an Evangelical American preacher who has ended a suicide [or was he pushed?], Linda at this point is the girlfriend of Zimmer and a true believer in religious apocalypse). Lenny's death could have been Lucas's; like Lenny, Lucas finds himself chased by an angry mob that also is shouting Itbah al-Yahud! Separated from the women, helped by no one, Lucas escapes; is it by chance that his most heroic act saves only Lucas himself? Linda's subsequent report to the Israel Defense Force (IDF) that Lenny, a Jew, could have been saved from the mob (a claim that circumstances tend to contradict) seals Nuala's fate as the scapegoat who must make amends with her life for shed Jewish blood.
Lucas's interest in Jerusalem Syndrome and any significance this phenomenon might ever have credibly possessed finally dissolves during those moments beneath the streets, when the plot to bomb the Temple Mount, so long rumored, seems on the verge of consummation. Janusz Zimmer is the chief agent provocateur, in league with minor operatives and mercenaries--a telling choice, as Zimmer also is nominally a journalist, yet, most unlike the curiously unprepossessing and often passive Christopher Lucas, willing to risk himself (for a price; no true believer, he) as point-man in a kind of terrorist's charade. The bomb is all flash and no boom; nothing is destroyed, no one is killed (De Kuff dies and Raziel is beaten insensate in the street) and the power-play of heretofore unknown (to the reader) Israel politicians succeeds simply because an attempt, always bogus, to bomb the Haram has been made. Jerusalem Syndrome? Nothing of the sort. It is the old game of political opportunism that sweeps aside self-interested civilians--unknowing, misinformed, naïve, blinded by desire in pursuit of private goals--as it seizes the initiative, and the moment.
Unless your undergraduate major was World Religions or you have since read-up the subject in both canonical and esoteric writings, a few narrative passages and some character-conversation will be more or less incomprehensible. Zoroastrian, Sufi, Gnostic, and Manichean notions compete with the several orthodoxies of Muslim, Christian, and Jew; Noah, Moses, and Christ, Jehovah and Yahweh (don't these names refer to one God?) and, yes, Azazel and Satan, share the metaphysical stage with Mohammed and Saladin and Teresa of Ávila, Serapis and Philo, Pico della Mirandola--and also Sabazios Sabaoth, Hermes Trismegistus, Elisha ben Abouya--and Salman Rushdie! Not to mention Marx; the Nazi apologist and historian Alfred Rosenberg; and, more implicitly, Freud, registering alternative interpretations of history and human consciousness. Although understanding each and every such allusion would be wonderful (and likely lead one to love the novel in its flattery of one's knowledge), some of this is just name-dropping for the sake of tone, as well as a shorthand method of indicating, The whole world is here. All beliefs, all ideas, everything humankind has ever thought and felt, said and done. And all of it is competing for recognition as the truth. Damascus Gate is a great, true, knowing book and repays any amount of attention the reader is willing to give it.
~JL
The story's most engaging questions are where (or when; or whether) authentic experience blends into its counterfeit and how one is to distinguish between the genuine and its semblance. This distinction applies to religious faith and sectarian play-acting; ideological commitment and political posturing; a friend and a convenient acquaintance; love and something else. It would be exciting, for example, to read Adam De Kuff as the latest incarnation of the Messiah, yet one recognizes (thanks to the clarifying commentary of his psychiatrist, Dr. Obermann) that De Kuff is psychologically fragile and his Messianic convictions mere fantasies generated by manic-depression. Thus, De Kuff is deluded--or is he? Maybe his psychiatrist, Pinchas Obermann, is a pseudo-scientific materialist incapable of perceiving the Divine Soul immanent in a disheveled, broken-down old man. At this point, the reader might recall Peter Shaffer's brilliant play, Equus, in which an adolescent boy's savage, aberrant love of horses prompts his doctor to question whether a normal psychological state is desirable if it cancels or precludes intense, transformative emotion: that is, ecstasy. If to be psychologically "normal" is to live a life that is dead to powerful emotion, is it not preferable to forsake the "normal" and pursue the unruly, free, all-consuming, mind/body/soul orgasmic experience? Lacking such intense emotion, is a person truly alive, truly human?
Ecstasy, however, is dangerous. In Equus, the boy's love is a confused amalgam of the religious and the erotic, a volatile psycho-emotional construction created almost by chance, that causes shame and precipitates a bloody atrocity. De Kuff's manic delusions prompt him to preach what many might wish to believe--that all faiths, all beliefs, all versions of the Abrahamic God are one--and what many others consider blasphemy. De Kuff's syncretistic pronouncements attract followers and, ultimately, precipitate a street fight that kills him and puts his chief disciple and sedulous handler, Raziel Melker, in a coma. Has Raziel really believed De Kuff to be the Messiah? Has his touting De Kuff to Sonia as the herald of a new existence been the latest chapter of revealed religion born of genuine belief? Is Raziel's destruction by an intolerant mob an authentic martyrdom earned and confirmed by this belief? Is De Kuff's? Or has Raziel just been egging-on a crazy old man and "selling" him as the Messiah merely as part of a private amusement or promiscuous con? After all, De Kuff's independent wealth finances not only his itinerant preaching but also Raziel's heroin habit. Did Raziel ever truly believe the old man's assertion that "Everything is Torah" and his further claims of spiritual oneness? Or has he merely feigned belief to win De Kuff's trust and lend legitimacy and excitement to the provocations he, Raziel, seems to enjoy enacting in the faces of all true believers, Christian, Muslim, and Jew?
Any reader's understanding of the novel can prosper from asking such questions about most of what is done and said in it. Also worth considering in this light is the character of Christopher Lucas, the American journalist who is resident in Jerusalem and nominally working on a feature story about "Jerusalem Syndrome"--a tendency for certain, perhaps especially susceptible or impressionable, visitors to the city to conceive an evolving sense that they have been chosen to act out or facilitate some highly significant, even miraculous event in the service of one religion or another. Although we may take Lucas's interest in Jerusalem Syndrome at face value, we also may wonder why he settles on this story when so many others--more urgent, more violent, more "glamorous"--seem to press on his attention. Foregoing the construction of a meta-fictional mirroring that would read the text of Damascus Gate (or large portions of it) as an unmediated, unedited version of the feature piece Lucas might eventually write (I am thinking particularly, of course, of the sections that focus on Raziel and De Kuff), we recognize pretty quickly that Lucas's interest in Jerusalem's diverse and disparate seekers is a simple displacement of his interest in himself.
Half-Christian, half-Jew, Lucas admits to being undecided about his identity and the nature of his belief, or even if he has any. He haunts Jerusalem, in part, to (re)discover who he is and might become, what he might believe, and why. In the course of investigating Jerusalem Syndrome, he canvasses local figures, like Dr. Obermann and the U.S. Counsel, Sylvia Chin, as well as intriguing (and obviously dangerous) foreigners like Nuala Rice and Janusz Zimmer (more of him later), who obviously know something about the phenomenon even if they do not call it by its somewhat tendentious name. In the process of doing his journalistic legwork, Lucas gets caught up in those very impersonal and indiscriminately destructive forces of religion and history whose psychological effects he is attempting to document and interpret. Discovering how these forces so easily deny personal agency to everyone who tries to think and act outside or apart from their respective contexts, Lucas almost gets himself killed.
A poorly-planned, chaotic excursion to the Gaza Strip, instigated by Nuala Rice and, with a separate agenda, Linda Erickson, ends with the murder (also by mob violence) of a young man, Hal Morris, who is acting under the alias "Lenny" at the behest of Janusz Zimmer and in confederacy with Erickson (formerly the wife of an Evangelical American preacher who has ended a suicide [or was he pushed?], Linda at this point is the girlfriend of Zimmer and a true believer in religious apocalypse). Lenny's death could have been Lucas's; like Lenny, Lucas finds himself chased by an angry mob that also is shouting Itbah al-Yahud! Separated from the women, helped by no one, Lucas escapes; is it by chance that his most heroic act saves only Lucas himself? Linda's subsequent report to the Israel Defense Force (IDF) that Lenny, a Jew, could have been saved from the mob (a claim that circumstances tend to contradict) seals Nuala's fate as the scapegoat who must make amends with her life for shed Jewish blood.
Lucas's interest in Jerusalem Syndrome and any significance this phenomenon might ever have credibly possessed finally dissolves during those moments beneath the streets, when the plot to bomb the Temple Mount, so long rumored, seems on the verge of consummation. Janusz Zimmer is the chief agent provocateur, in league with minor operatives and mercenaries--a telling choice, as Zimmer also is nominally a journalist, yet, most unlike the curiously unprepossessing and often passive Christopher Lucas, willing to risk himself (for a price; no true believer, he) as point-man in a kind of terrorist's charade. The bomb is all flash and no boom; nothing is destroyed, no one is killed (De Kuff dies and Raziel is beaten insensate in the street) and the power-play of heretofore unknown (to the reader) Israel politicians succeeds simply because an attempt, always bogus, to bomb the Haram has been made. Jerusalem Syndrome? Nothing of the sort. It is the old game of political opportunism that sweeps aside self-interested civilians--unknowing, misinformed, naïve, blinded by desire in pursuit of private goals--as it seizes the initiative, and the moment.
Unless your undergraduate major was World Religions or you have since read-up the subject in both canonical and esoteric writings, a few narrative passages and some character-conversation will be more or less incomprehensible. Zoroastrian, Sufi, Gnostic, and Manichean notions compete with the several orthodoxies of Muslim, Christian, and Jew; Noah, Moses, and Christ, Jehovah and Yahweh (don't these names refer to one God?) and, yes, Azazel and Satan, share the metaphysical stage with Mohammed and Saladin and Teresa of Ávila, Serapis and Philo, Pico della Mirandola--and also Sabazios Sabaoth, Hermes Trismegistus, Elisha ben Abouya--and Salman Rushdie! Not to mention Marx; the Nazi apologist and historian Alfred Rosenberg; and, more implicitly, Freud, registering alternative interpretations of history and human consciousness. Although understanding each and every such allusion would be wonderful (and likely lead one to love the novel in its flattery of one's knowledge), some of this is just name-dropping for the sake of tone, as well as a shorthand method of indicating, The whole world is here. All beliefs, all ideas, everything humankind has ever thought and felt, said and done. And all of it is competing for recognition as the truth. Damascus Gate is a great, true, knowing book and repays any amount of attention the reader is willing to give it.
~JL
January 5, 2025
A slightly-less-than middle-aged reporter finds himself in the center of an extremist Zionist/Millenarian plot to blow the Al-Aqsa mosque to smithereens.
Working on a book about the “Jerusalem Syndrome,” in which delusional Christians, Jews, Syncretists, etc. suffering from mental illness find themselves called upon by God to commit acts of terror in Jerusalem, Chris Lucas follows the cult of a rich New Orleans Jew that’s being manipulated by a heroin-addicted savant musician into believing he is the second coming of Jesus, the Mashiach, the Mahdi.
Stone’s novel talks about 1990s Israel as if I’ve been there, but I haven’t, so a bunch of references probably went right over my head. Almost the first half of the book is spent on exposition; I think it’s at like 55% or so that the word “bomb” is written for the first time. After reading some of Stone’s other novels, I expected a slow build up, but I found the length of the novel and my unfamiliarity with its reference lost my attention. Stone likes to write slimey characters like heroin junkies, violence-prone anti-social types, (communists), etc, but I found this novel to be quite tame.
If you are REALLY interested in a slow-burning religious thriller, you really like Jerusalem, or you’re a 60 year old man, this might be the book for you. Otherwise just read his more popular book “Dog Soldiers.”
Working on a book about the “Jerusalem Syndrome,” in which delusional Christians, Jews, Syncretists, etc. suffering from mental illness find themselves called upon by God to commit acts of terror in Jerusalem, Chris Lucas follows the cult of a rich New Orleans Jew that’s being manipulated by a heroin-addicted savant musician into believing he is the second coming of Jesus, the Mashiach, the Mahdi.
Stone’s novel talks about 1990s Israel as if I’ve been there, but I haven’t, so a bunch of references probably went right over my head. Almost the first half of the book is spent on exposition; I think it’s at like 55% or so that the word “bomb” is written for the first time. After reading some of Stone’s other novels, I expected a slow build up, but I found the length of the novel and my unfamiliarity with its reference lost my attention. Stone likes to write slimey characters like heroin junkies, violence-prone anti-social types, (communists), etc, but I found this novel to be quite tame.
If you are REALLY interested in a slow-burning religious thriller, you really like Jerusalem, or you’re a 60 year old man, this might be the book for you. Otherwise just read his more popular book “Dog Soldiers.”
June 22, 2025
Damascus Gate was first published twenty-seven years ago, but the plots, subplots, and conspiracies that its characters grapple with are just as relevant today. Jerusalem, the world's largest open door insane asylum--Robert Stone knew it well, or knew it well enough to lay bare the convergence of religion and politics that make Jerusalem the center of most of the planet's problems. Muslims occupy one quarter of the Old City, Jews another, and with Christians dream fantasies of rebuilding the Temple Mount and ushering in the new Messiah or the return of the old. So much energy spent dreaming of a perfect world, while the work of making this one better seems to have become an afterthought. Some of the original critics of Stone's novel described it as bloated, and there are scenes that might have been better served left in an earlier draft, but there are others that will stick with you as a reader for a long time. In spite of its 500 page length, Damascus Gate is a further reminder that those who would dismiss the Middle East lightly are fools and not to be taken seriously.
July 15, 2022
A long, complex novel set in the Holy Land of the Middle East, its large cast of characters explores the ever-evolving religions, faiths, cults, resentments, passions, hatreds. ambitions, and dreams that continually emerge in that rocky desert landscape. Although it demands close reading, the plot also turns it into page-turner, with the result that I was more deeply engrossed by Damascus Gate than I usually am with many novels, however skillful they might be.
March 28, 2022
Jerusalem is here in all Her madness & metaphysical glory.
The full power of the main character of this book - the city of Jerusalem - is brilliantly captured in this ingenious novel, especially when taken to it's extreme in the form of the very real Jerusalem Syndrome. Yes, Jerusalem can drive otherwise "normal" people to many forms of madness. And the human characters in this novel are perfect expressions of all the various shapes & shades of human personalities, and honestly portrays how the brooding influence of this ageless city affects them all. I can imagine that Robert Stone's genius in conveying this powerful presence may be lost on anyone unfamiliar with Jerusalem. I lived in Jerusalem for close to 9 years, and - although they're fictional - I know all the characters in this book quite well. In fact, some of my best friends were the Messiah. [Rather immodestly, I'm more than half convinced that the author met me and a mentally ill friend for whom I would act as guardian when he was out & about in the Old City.] The sense of humor (a requisite to surviving in Jerusalem with sanity intact) inherent to the book - it begins with the protagonist waking up on Easter morning - is a commodity rarely found in books depicting the "troubles" of the Middle East. And it is precisely the element needed to communicate the ironies, contradictions, beliefs, and lack of beliefs which embody the region, and the myriads of forms of religious & political ideals which swarm around it like fish in the ocean. In the center of it all is Jerusalem, physically manifesting every ideal, power, & apparent contradiction, equilibrating them all in one glorious nontheistic & apolitical entity. This is the reality seen by the characters of Adam De Kuff & Raziel Belker; they see the Unity, not the differences - "all is Torah." Unfortunately, it is human nature, brought out to its worst extreme in the Middle East, to focus on the differences. And this is what the main character - Jerusalem - of the book is constantly defying, by being a physical proof of the Unity of All. And Stone gives us an excellent view of how people who come to Jerusalem deal with, or deny, this proof which surrounds them. The results are limited: madness, political or religious zeal (choosing a specific doctrine of differentiation), or denial of it all & loss of self relative to the multitudes of identities which are asserted in & by Jerusalem.
The full power of the main character of this book - the city of Jerusalem - is brilliantly captured in this ingenious novel, especially when taken to it's extreme in the form of the very real Jerusalem Syndrome. Yes, Jerusalem can drive otherwise "normal" people to many forms of madness. And the human characters in this novel are perfect expressions of all the various shapes & shades of human personalities, and honestly portrays how the brooding influence of this ageless city affects them all. I can imagine that Robert Stone's genius in conveying this powerful presence may be lost on anyone unfamiliar with Jerusalem. I lived in Jerusalem for close to 9 years, and - although they're fictional - I know all the characters in this book quite well. In fact, some of my best friends were the Messiah. [Rather immodestly, I'm more than half convinced that the author met me and a mentally ill friend for whom I would act as guardian when he was out & about in the Old City.] The sense of humor (a requisite to surviving in Jerusalem with sanity intact) inherent to the book - it begins with the protagonist waking up on Easter morning - is a commodity rarely found in books depicting the "troubles" of the Middle East. And it is precisely the element needed to communicate the ironies, contradictions, beliefs, and lack of beliefs which embody the region, and the myriads of forms of religious & political ideals which swarm around it like fish in the ocean. In the center of it all is Jerusalem, physically manifesting every ideal, power, & apparent contradiction, equilibrating them all in one glorious nontheistic & apolitical entity. This is the reality seen by the characters of Adam De Kuff & Raziel Belker; they see the Unity, not the differences - "all is Torah." Unfortunately, it is human nature, brought out to its worst extreme in the Middle East, to focus on the differences. And this is what the main character - Jerusalem - of the book is constantly defying, by being a physical proof of the Unity of All. And Stone gives us an excellent view of how people who come to Jerusalem deal with, or deny, this proof which surrounds them. The results are limited: madness, political or religious zeal (choosing a specific doctrine of differentiation), or denial of it all & loss of self relative to the multitudes of identities which are asserted in & by Jerusalem.
October 1, 2007
I'm not entirely sure how I feel about this book. In the end, I have to say that I liked it. I felt like I could really feel the tensions amongst the many different groups in Israel and Palestinian terratories, and the utter confusion that is/was Jerusalem (book takes place in 1992). And, most importantly, the book did keep my interest (although there were certainly boring segments). The author is very wordy; sometimes he states thoughts so perfectly, I feel like I've never read anything so clear yet complicated in my life, and at other times, I had no idea what he was talking about because he was very wordy but also very abstract. I think it's the abstractness of the characters that bothered me. For example, two main character, Chris and Sonia, fall madly in love with one another, but I was never able to really feel that between them - it was all described too abstractly for me to truely understand. However, other aspects of the book were described so perfectly (for me, that is), that I felt like I was right there watching it all happen. As I mentioned, I am confused about how I feel about this book; I'm not sure that I could recommend it, but, at the same time, I am thinking of reading it again myself. I think I could get a lot more out of it by reading it twice.
May 5, 2010
I have to say I am a bit ambivalent about this audiobook. I picked it to try to understand about the daily conditions in this area of the world and the book helped in that respect. It is hard to imagine how people go about the daily business of life in an area filled with such conflict and animosity. All sides have their problems and have adapted to the powder keg they live on. On the other hand, the deep cynicism was a little hard to take and at times I felt like I was listening to a dream rather than a connected story. A lot of the characters melted into each other and I often lost track. There didn't seem to be a sane person in the bunch.
I also had a problem with some of the hippie like discourses. I didn't like listening to people rambling on, saying things that didn't make any sense and thinking they were being profound. I think I understand what the author was trying to get at, but it was very tiresome. At times I had to go back and listen to a section again because I missed the tiny bit of action which propelled the story because I was so lost in the meandering of some of the character's long discourses.
I also had a problem with some of the hippie like discourses. I didn't like listening to people rambling on, saying things that didn't make any sense and thinking they were being profound. I think I understand what the author was trying to get at, but it was very tiresome. At times I had to go back and listen to a section again because I missed the tiny bit of action which propelled the story because I was so lost in the meandering of some of the character's long discourses.
December 6, 2017
A difficult and challenging read that required me to have my laptop handy to look up definitions, but well worth the concentration and time. I finally feel like I have some understanding into the complex situation in Israel.This is at once a history,a psychology and a sociology of Jerusalem crammed into one fascinating story. It is the story of finding belief in an insane world, steeped in the culture of redemption,revenge and retaliation, with all the adversaries calling on their God, to vanquish their opponents. .It is an exploration of all of the many faiths who , over the centuries, have a stake in that ancient city and , with the Trump announcement today supporting Jerusalem as Isreals capitol, more timely than ever.This is a book I am going to re-read to ensure i have gleaned all the info possible and which I will think of often in the tumultuous days likely to come.
February 6, 2012
Meh.
I bought and sold and bought and sold and bought this book, each time thinking I would read it. Great promises of chills, thrills, and apocalyptic whoopee, like a politically correct Leon Uris novel.
You know the line from Casablanca? ("The problems of two little people don't amount to a hill of beans...")? Not only does the book spend acres of pages trying to refute that very point ("No, seriously -- their problems amount to a whole Temple Mount's worth of beans.") - but Stone actually quotes the damned movie as proof that he's not going to do what he does.
Double Meh. And sold...!
I bought and sold and bought and sold and bought this book, each time thinking I would read it. Great promises of chills, thrills, and apocalyptic whoopee, like a politically correct Leon Uris novel.
You know the line from Casablanca? ("The problems of two little people don't amount to a hill of beans...")? Not only does the book spend acres of pages trying to refute that very point ("No, seriously -- their problems amount to a whole Temple Mount's worth of beans.") - but Stone actually quotes the damned movie as proof that he's not going to do what he does.
Double Meh. And sold...!
February 7, 2012
I think this book was much more popular when it first came out than it would be now. I found the main character totally flat and unconvincing. The tons of support characters and themes went on too long for me. Bottom line--Israel is a complicated place and both politics and religion create a flammable mix...as if we didn't know!
July 11, 2012
As close as I would usually get to a traditional thriller. Highly recommended for those who, like myself, are always fascinated by the enigma of God(s) and worship and faith. An excellent snapshot of a paranoid time in the cradle of Monotheism, that has moments of near prophecy. Stone is a writer whose soul has known struggle.
November 12, 2013
Very disappointing book. All the characters were stereotypes. The Palestinians are pretty much all running around shouting 'Kill the Jews' and the Israelis are all treated sympathetically. Not a real sense of place and nothing to be gained by reading it. A very old school perspective on a conflict and region far more complex and compelling than this book portrays.
January 1, 2014
After 136 pages of tedious character development , I only found empathy with one who was terminally ill . Still no idea of the plot , I gave up on the read , which is something I rarely do . I guess I would finish this book if I was a prisoner-of-war , and it was the only volume available . Ugh !!
July 14, 2015
Not great. Here's an author too full of his own intellect and fine knowledge of a city that the story gets lost. Every fifth word is foreign, in italics, and without a glossary, that by page 70 I'd given up trying to remember them.
Sorry, but I don't want to work this hard to enjoy a read.
Sorry, but I don't want to work this hard to enjoy a read.
July 23, 2019
I went between giving this 4 stars or 5 and landed on 5 because of 'Damascus Gate's' lead character Chris Lucas. Chris is a phenomenally conceived character who, like this novel by Robert Stone, has as many flaws as you can shake a stick at, but in the end it is those specific flaws that make you love the character.
Chris is the prodigal "man without a country." He hops from source to source, end of town to end of town and one spit of desert to the next without hinderance but finds himself still tethered by some of the most basic human qualities and wants -- love, belief and self-preservation. Through these things he struggles to gain a relationship with a passionate and religious militant, battles his own Catholic-Jewish background while feeling the push of Zionist beliefs thrust onto him and finally, by the end of the novel, a desire to simply make it out of Jerusalem alive. Stone gives into some fairly cliche characterization and story development techniques at various times, but the ambition and scope of the novel and what it says about Jerusalem as it is and Jerusalem as it is viewed from an American perspective couldn't be much more impressive. No, not all Muslim and Christian Palestinians go through the streets along the Gaza Strip yelling "Itbah al Yahud" ("Kill the Jew.") But does it happen? Of course it does. Same as passionate communist freedom fighters -- whom appear prominently in 'Damascus Gate' -- parade recklessly into areas they shouldn't be so they can "help out" in some way and then pay the consequences.
It is through these cliched characters who are so attached to what it is they believe they are worshipping or fighting for that Chris Lucas' lone wolf status is able to carry the novel. Chris is perpetually lost, but in his being lost there is a constant sense of security. Security in that he knows who he is, what he is. He isn't a journalist. He isn't biased or unbiased. He's just a human being. The tragedy of that condition ultimately leaves him as alone at the end of the novel as he is when we meet him in the opening pages. That is the beauty and truth of this book -- no one place and its aura is more powerful than anyone's personhood. That is why Chris persists. That is also why the novel succeeds.
Chris is the prodigal "man without a country." He hops from source to source, end of town to end of town and one spit of desert to the next without hinderance but finds himself still tethered by some of the most basic human qualities and wants -- love, belief and self-preservation. Through these things he struggles to gain a relationship with a passionate and religious militant, battles his own Catholic-Jewish background while feeling the push of Zionist beliefs thrust onto him and finally, by the end of the novel, a desire to simply make it out of Jerusalem alive. Stone gives into some fairly cliche characterization and story development techniques at various times, but the ambition and scope of the novel and what it says about Jerusalem as it is and Jerusalem as it is viewed from an American perspective couldn't be much more impressive. No, not all Muslim and Christian Palestinians go through the streets along the Gaza Strip yelling "Itbah al Yahud" ("Kill the Jew.") But does it happen? Of course it does. Same as passionate communist freedom fighters -- whom appear prominently in 'Damascus Gate' -- parade recklessly into areas they shouldn't be so they can "help out" in some way and then pay the consequences.
It is through these cliched characters who are so attached to what it is they believe they are worshipping or fighting for that Chris Lucas' lone wolf status is able to carry the novel. Chris is perpetually lost, but in his being lost there is a constant sense of security. Security in that he knows who he is, what he is. He isn't a journalist. He isn't biased or unbiased. He's just a human being. The tragedy of that condition ultimately leaves him as alone at the end of the novel as he is when we meet him in the opening pages. That is the beauty and truth of this book -- no one place and its aura is more powerful than anyone's personhood. That is why Chris persists. That is also why the novel succeeds.
May 30, 2022
I've resisted docking this novel by one star out of immense respect for Robert Stone. I understand why he wrote it, how he wrote it and the choices he made. But I just cannot manufacture enthusiasm for the setting and subject matter. IOW, I don't share his obsession with religion and mysticism; my reactions are pretty much revulsion and deadly boredom. I couldn't wait to finish all 500 pages.
I wonder if Stone would have written such a book today. It was published in 1998 and, give 9/11 and America's Longest War, now seems rather dated--especially since we America now know the true enemy is within (and encouraged by Putin). However, religious zeal of all kinds helped get us here and is the oldest story in world.
Every iconic writer is allowed to let their passion run wild and turn it into one flawed book. The failure here is not fatal and reading it was instructional for this writer (there is no "bad Stone."). One can lose sight of what's important through over-researching. In his other books, Stone decorates the story with just enough acronyms and vague allusions to tyrannical policy and greed to feel authentic. Here, he just goes berserk. Damascus Gate is a tad overpopulated, somewhat overwritten and almost doomed by depressing dogmatic verisimilitude. If you love Israel and the hopelessly fucked up Mideast, you'll enjoy this novel.
Stone has stated the writing of this was, at time, excruciating. I can see that. It got away from him but by the end he does regain control and we get to see him soar quite a few times, when he really gets inside a character's head. This novel for Stone, I think, is analogous to Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson: not his best work, but something he HAD to write and get out of his system. Johnson's father worked for the State Dept./CIA in the years leading up to our disaster in Vietnam and it haunted him. At least Stone and Johnson tried to face down an essential, obsessive part of their personal history and came up with best-selling, award-winning novels. Which is, in the end, their job.
I wonder if Stone would have written such a book today. It was published in 1998 and, give 9/11 and America's Longest War, now seems rather dated--especially since we America now know the true enemy is within (and encouraged by Putin). However, religious zeal of all kinds helped get us here and is the oldest story in world.
Every iconic writer is allowed to let their passion run wild and turn it into one flawed book. The failure here is not fatal and reading it was instructional for this writer (there is no "bad Stone."). One can lose sight of what's important through over-researching. In his other books, Stone decorates the story with just enough acronyms and vague allusions to tyrannical policy and greed to feel authentic. Here, he just goes berserk. Damascus Gate is a tad overpopulated, somewhat overwritten and almost doomed by depressing dogmatic verisimilitude. If you love Israel and the hopelessly fucked up Mideast, you'll enjoy this novel.
Stone has stated the writing of this was, at time, excruciating. I can see that. It got away from him but by the end he does regain control and we get to see him soar quite a few times, when he really gets inside a character's head. This novel for Stone, I think, is analogous to Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson: not his best work, but something he HAD to write and get out of his system. Johnson's father worked for the State Dept./CIA in the years leading up to our disaster in Vietnam and it haunted him. At least Stone and Johnson tried to face down an essential, obsessive part of their personal history and came up with best-selling, award-winning novels. Which is, in the end, their job.
December 12, 2023
Robert Stone is a weird one. Dog Soldiers is one of my favourite novels for the way it rides the line between gun-heavy thriller and dense, paranoid post-war fiction - but it's a tough balance to pull off. Damascus Gate doesn't do it quite as well.
While it's full of classic Stone characters - spiritually wayward Westerners wandering in places where they shouldn't be - and complex digressions into the religious history of Jerusalem, the actual bones of Damascus Gate are just a little bit Dan Brown-ish. As if Stone had a heap of high ideas about Christian Zionism and doomsday mystics, but nothing better to hang them on than an "oh my god there's a bomb"-style plot. It's a shame because those same ideas and the aesthetic are as compelling as you'd expect from Stone, but it's hard to see them as anything more than jazzy intellectual padding on a story that wouldn't be out of place in an airport paperback. A look over the reviews here suggests many readers picked it up expecting just that.
Good, but RS has better.
While it's full of classic Stone characters - spiritually wayward Westerners wandering in places where they shouldn't be - and complex digressions into the religious history of Jerusalem, the actual bones of Damascus Gate are just a little bit Dan Brown-ish. As if Stone had a heap of high ideas about Christian Zionism and doomsday mystics, but nothing better to hang them on than an "oh my god there's a bomb"-style plot. It's a shame because those same ideas and the aesthetic are as compelling as you'd expect from Stone, but it's hard to see them as anything more than jazzy intellectual padding on a story that wouldn't be out of place in an airport paperback. A look over the reviews here suggests many readers picked it up expecting just that.
Good, but RS has better.
October 10, 2025
I wondered why I had never heard of this fairly renowned author - until that is, I tried to read this book. Meandering and self-indulgent are the two adjectives that spring to mind. After several chapters I still didn't have a clue where the story was going. Endless dialogues that go nowhere and a tendency to embark on unilluminating descriptions.
Stone is endlessly fascinated by superfluous detail. In the course of just one and a half pages we have the following character descriptions:
"Two men sat in the waiting room. One was about thirty, in stonewashed jeans and a black shirt with a beige windbreaker."
"The second man was older, round-shouldered, melancholy and overweight. He had on khaki trousers, a white shirt with a plaid tie and a tweed jacket."
"Dr. Obermann was red-bearded, crew-cut and thick-bodied. He wore a turtleneck and slacks and army-issue glasses."
"He smiled his pink-edged bad-boy smile and spread his long, jeans-clad legs out in front of him. He wore lizard boots from Africa."
If you like this kind of stuff, this is the book for you...
Stone is endlessly fascinated by superfluous detail. In the course of just one and a half pages we have the following character descriptions:
"Two men sat in the waiting room. One was about thirty, in stonewashed jeans and a black shirt with a beige windbreaker."
"The second man was older, round-shouldered, melancholy and overweight. He had on khaki trousers, a white shirt with a plaid tie and a tweed jacket."
"Dr. Obermann was red-bearded, crew-cut and thick-bodied. He wore a turtleneck and slacks and army-issue glasses."
"He smiled his pink-edged bad-boy smile and spread his long, jeans-clad legs out in front of him. He wore lizard boots from Africa."
If you like this kind of stuff, this is the book for you...
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