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The characters' actions and personal histories are similarly pumped up. A beautiful Irishwoman -- actually, all the women in the novel are beautiful -- dedicated (perhaps a bit belatedly) to the international communist revolution, is reported to have been: mistress of a Druse militia chief in Lebanon, the lover of an insurgent colonel in Eritrea who helped her obtain food for the hungry, somehow involved with the Israeli elite fighting unit the Golani Brigade (Stone mistakenly calls it a regiment) as well as with Palestinian guerrillas. In the time frame of the novel, she is involved, sexually and politically, with a Palestinian communist working as a doctor in the Gaza Strip, and there are mind-boggling intricacies of exchanges she helps effect of drugs for arms, with knowing winks from the Israeli secret service and the collaboration of shady profiteers in Tel Aviv.

The improbably adventurous career of this international revolutionist is a model for the way the world at large is conceived in Stone's novel: Everybody is in bed with everybody else, if not literally (there's actually not much sex in the book), then figuratively. A single tangled thread leads from apocalyptic Christian fundamentalists to Jewish messianic syncretists to drug dealers to Palestinian guerrillas to the Shabak (not the "pet name" for Israel's General Security Forces, as Stone claims, but its Hebrew acronym) to intransigent settlers and their American Jewish supporters to Israeli opposition politicians scheming to get back into power. One can grant that politics in Israel is at least as corrupt as anywhere else, and that sometimes things happen through strange or even sinister alliances behind the scenes. Even so, Stone's notion of ubiquitous conspiracy and a pervasive interlocking network of sundry extremists and political interest groups strains belief. The real motive for representing things in this extravagant fashion is not a desire to be faithful to the realities of contemporary Israel but the requirements of suspense, leading to a grand resolution of all the excitements of plot.

As the novelist methodically prepares to plug in all his elaborate connections, he conducts a spectacular fireworks show that takes up most of the book's last 200 pages. The first act is in the Gaza Strip, where the protagonist finds himself caught in the throes of a general insurrection: Bloodthirsty crowds charge about in the night, piles of burning tires spew columns of black smoke to the sky, helicopters roar overhead, Israeli troops sprint through the dark with weapons at ready and Lucas flees across fields from a Palestinian mob only to fall into the brutal hands of Jewish settlers. Then, after an interlude on the Golan Heights that involves a close scrape at the Syrian border, a potent dose of hallucinogens and many portentous messianic pronouncements, Stone moves all his main characters back to Jerusalem for the finale: another nocturnal scene with rioters in the streets of the Old City, a conjunction of more conspirators from disparate points of the world's map than you can shake a stick at, a secret underground tunnel to the Temple Mount that leads to the hidden sanctuary of an ancient pagan god and a last-minute rescue by Israeli commandos of Lucas and his embattled companions.

By this point, the underlying disparity between the assiduously researched surface details of Israeli reality and the plot and conception of the novel should be evident. The thriller plot with its mysteries and revelations could just as easily have been set in any other trouble spot -- Northern Ireland or Burma or Indonesia, with a simple substitution of sectarian coloration and terrorist flag to suit the change of place. The very formulaic character of Stone's language makes the purportedly Israeli scene ultimately interchangeable with other places. At the end of the first chapter, as Lucas watches the woman with whom he will fall in love disappear into the streets of the Old City, he thinks: "Who knew to what arcane aspect of the city she might attach? The place was full of mysteries." The generality of such proclamation of mystery in the exotic city suggests how readily this whole modular verbal construction could be reassembled for a novel set in Istanbul, Karachi, Bangkok or Moscow. "Damascus Gate," instead of probing the distinctive realities of Israel on the brink of the millennium, roiling in its own peculiar mix of religious and political extremisms, is a kind of novelistic "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom," unfolding around the site of the biblical Temple. Indeed, one wonders whether the film might have been the real inspiration for the novel.
SALON | April 16, 1998

Robert Alter's two most recent books are "Hebrew and Modernity" and "Genesis: Translation and Commentary." He teaches at the University of California at Berkeley.