SOURCE: Hynes, James. “A Lost Soul in Israel.” Washington Post Book World (3 May 1998): 1, 10.

In the following review, Hynes contends that Damascus Gate is ambitious, powerful, and “Dickensian” in its scope.

Robert Stone's reputation as a political novelist is something of an oversimplification. The practice of politics in his novels is almost always desperate, bloody and futile. And there has been a strong spiritual undercurrent to Stone's work; his first three novels each open with a scene between a lost soul of one sort or another and a Christian missionary. Almost all of his books conclude with a major character in a desolate place, stripped of all illusions under a merciless sky—the Nietzschean mercenary Hicks in Dog Soldiers, the morally compromised anthropologist Holliwell in A Flag for Sunrise, the crazed sailor Browne in Outerbridge Reach. Much of the action in his work might be described as characters searching...