MILLICENT BELL
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schizoid with a messianic complex. Their combination helps to fuel a thriller
plot that involves God-obsessed Christians, Jews, and Arabs as well as polit–
ical zealots devoted to either the perpetuity or the destruction of the Jewish
state, Israeli official police, the unofficial Jewish militia bands and Palestinian
hit squads, terrorist circuit riders, veterans of the fronts in Beirut and
Somalia, and professional spies and adventurers, hustlers and con-men. Raziel
becomes the manipulator-or John the Baptist-who promotes de Kuff's
rise as a come-again Christ. With a ragtag troop of followers, they drift into
the current of a plot to recover the Temple Mount and rebuild the temple
of Solomon. The actual terrorists who want to blow up the existing Moslem
shrines on the Mount are both Christian rnillenarians and Jewish funda–
mentalist extremists, but non-violent visionaries of various kinds are also
drawn into a tightening swirl that involves drugs-for-arms swaps and murder.
Lucas's wanderings take us here and there--in Gaza, by the Red Sea, in
desert and mountain country and along the Mediterranean coast, and,
repeatedly, into the streets of Jerusalem. Some figures appear and reappear
out of the crowd, like the fanatic Irish aid-worker, Nuala Rice, who dies for
her Communist faith; Janusz Zimmer, an alienated Marxist and soldier of
fortune from Poland; and the shifty, anti-Semitic and anti-American English
archaeologist Gordon Lestrade, who claims to be able to pinpoint exactly the
location of the Holy of Holies. Lestrade is on the staff of the House of the
Galilean, a "Christian study group" whose literature speaks obscurely of the
need to rebuild the temple. Also attached to the House is the Reverend
Theodore Ericksen, a Quiet American who eventually jumps "or is pushed"
from the top of a parapet of the Old City wall. His disaffected wife, Linda,
takes her naive fundamentalist certainties into various beds-and ultimately
into that of the cynical Zimmer-and becomes a courier of explosives.
Damascus Gate
is likely to be made into a movie, one of these days. Its
structure has been influenced by the movies, especially by the suspense
film, and one can even say that it is already a movie script that seems to call
for the camera to give visibility to its implied scenes, to remind one of the
appearances of its many characters who flash in and out of view. We have
the impression of hearing dialogue almost continuously, without prose fic–
tion's helping explanations and identifications, while a cross-cutting camera
takes us back and forth to various locations, and the relation of events only
gradually discloses itself. But Stone seems to have wanted to give his novel
a metaphysical dimension that would not easily translate to the screen.
Lucas is no religious quester, but he majored in religion in college and his
unforgotten Catholic upbringing causes him to murmur "Lord, I believe;
help Thou mine unbelief." His research into the causes of the Jerusalem
Syndrome involves him in discussions with Obermann, Lestrade, Raziel,
Sonia, and others about the common qualities of the diversified religionists
