Robert Stone cradles his head in his hands and sighs. Thousands of years of history are weighing heavily on him, not to mention air travel and late nights. A veteran of the world's trouble spots and an adventurer in the realms of psychedelia, this 61-year-old American novelist has spent the past three decades observing the ironies of geo-politics with benign detachment. Outsiders, misfits, sceptics and addicts throng his novels and they congregate wherever ideology and dreams collide. Jerusalem, then, seems the perfect location for his latest book.
"I knew immediately that Jerusalem was my kind of place," he says, in his slow, deliberate tones. "It attracts the kind of people that I write about: the people who need to see the world bleed. Some think they might be able to help, some are driven by religious compulsion. Everyone has their own agenda."
The complex, layered history of Jerusalem fascinates Stone, and in Damascus Gate he has vividly recreated the ancient city. Set in 1992 against the backdrop of the intifada, the novel teems with conflicting agendas, conspiracies and counter-conspiracies, as an American journalist (Lucas) begins to research a book on what's known as the "Jerusalem Syndrome". This is a recognised psychological condition whereby Christian visitors to the city become convinced that they are the Messiah, or Christ reborn, and there is a hospital in Jerusalem dedicated to the care of sufferers. Lucas's research brings him into contact with an extraordinary cast of seekers, ideologues and opportunists, including an Irish UN aid worker supplying guns to the Palestinians and Christian fundamentalists who want to rebuild the Temple of Jerusalem.
He falls in with an idealistic group of spiritual syncretists who advocate a blend of Hinduism, the Kabbala, Sufic Islam and the Christian mysticism of Meister Eckhart and John of the Cross, which infuriates almost everyone in the Holy City. Among them are an American manic depressive who believes that he is the Lamb of God, a junkie who manipulates him and a black American singer called Sonia, (who is also a Sufi and a UN aid worker) with whom Lucas falls heavily in love. "The brotherhood of truth is one in all ages," she tells him, and he's hooked.
Counter-terrorism and millennarianism intertwine when the Christian group is infiltrated by an extreme Zionist wing of the Israeli secret police. A plot is formed to blow up the Islamic shrines on the Temple Mount, which brings all the characters together in a complex net of intrigue. "There have in fact been four conspiracies to date to blow up the mosques on the Temple Mount, so it could happen," Stone says, in response to the suggestion that he may have over-complicated matters.
From Vietnam (A Hall Of Mirrors) to Central America (A Flag For Sunrise), the role of the US on the world stage has been repeatedly examined in Stone's novels and short fictions, but while this theme recurs in Damascus Gate, it takes second place to an extended meditation on the nature of religious faith and religious identity. Everyone in the novel is searching for something to believe in, with many of the characters trying to find ways of bridging the apparently insuperable divisions between adherents of different religious traditions.
Stone lived in Jerusalem and observed at close quarters the impulses towards cultural and religious pluralism and eclecticism that are evident there, especially among young people. Clearly this could be one way forward for Israel, but the prospect of the fragmentation of the country into impenetrable enclaves is also undeniably real. "It could go either way. There is a lot of goodwill, but `the worst are full of passionate intensity'. . ."
His own background is New York Catholic, and he says: "you never shake it. While I do not practise, I would say that Catholicism conditions a great many things about me, my way of looking at things." Does he view the resurgence of interest in spirituality in the west as a return to the realm of the personal after the failure of the great ideological projects of the 20th century? "Yes, this seems to me an accurate reflection of what's happening at present. At the beginning of this century, when religion began to be seen as a force which had been dissipated, there were various reactions. One was Protestant fundamentalism. The other was the Hegelian legacy of the German Romantics, which led to the attempts to substitute art for religion and then to turn life into art. Communism and, in particular, Nazism tried to turn life into melodrama: an opera with real blood and swords."
In the novel, Lucas has inherited from his parents the mixed legacy of Judaism and Catholicism, but can't fully identify with either. He has a profound need for faith, but comically mocks himself for it. "Like Lucas, we are all asking questions that often seem not to have any answers," says Stone. "We are seeing the growth of New Age beliefs because organised religion is not providing people with the intense experience that they require. "We create the inner world that we need in order to make it through life. Because it's so hard just to survive, to put one day in front of another." One way to try to evade the struggle is through drugs and alcohol, and Stone's characters always try plenty of each. "These have built-in limitations. They're solutions on a short-term basis."
Lucas's greatest moments of theological insight come to him when he's on his fourth whiskey - "no question, he thought, ontology went better with a drink" - and Stone humorously captures the euphoric sense of clarity and omnipotence that accompanies his drunken speculations.
From the Kabbala, the Veda and gnosticism, to Pascal and Descartes, Lucas has done his homework in ancient religions and the philosophies of east and west. "A collector of obscure lore" with a highly developed sense of history and symbolism, he is one of life's great annotators. It's clear that Stone shares his intellectual curiosity, but sometimes the reader can't help wishing that he didn't know quite so much, or that he hadn't felt the need to put everything he knew about religion into a single book. Stone likes to work on an ambitious scale, however, in the tradition of the 19th-century novel that still flourishes in the US: taking on big themes, issues and ideas, and creating an expansive canvas. "I learned to write novels from Conrad," he says. And doesn't the shade of Hemingway lurk in those exotic locations, the war zones, the feats of physical courage, the male anti-heroes? "Of course. When I started out, we all wanted to be Hemingway. He bestrode the world like a colossus. "But I please myself, as a writer, following my own impulses. I don't really care whether this is approved of by reviewers, who are usually put-down artists. I do it because I have to. I need to make up stories about the things that concern me. It's a compulsion."
But now that novels, particularly 500-page ones, are losing out to other media, does he worry about not reaching the readers that he wants? "It does concern me that novel-reading is in decline. There is, as we all know, a dumbing down and a prevalence of mediocrity, in cultural terms, which is dispiriting. So much of TV, for example, is meretricious, vulgar and violent. It seems to me that human sensibility should be increased in its intensity, not diluted. Literature makes the world less lonely. It provides recognition, so that we see our own condition mirrored in others. It enables us to recognise things that we already knew, but didn't know we knew. Don't you think?" It sounds as if the professional sceptic and eternal questioner has found a faith of sorts.
Damascus Gate is published by Picador (£16.99 in Britain).
