Let it be stated up front that this is a long, long book-one that ultimately does not reward the reader who makes it all the way to the end. Stone has attempted to craft work of ideas about faith and identity on the framework of a pseudo-millennial thriller (the book is set in 1992 or thereabouts), and the result fails in all areas. Firstly, there are a plethora of characters, very few of whom are developed into anything interesting, but almost all of whom have some odd background. Russian jazz club owners, Irish revolutionaries, rich Louisiana mystics, they're all here, along with the cliche cynical Western journalist to record it all. It's as if Stone wanted to create some sort of Graham Greenesque place where the flotsam and jetsam of the post-Cold War world have settled. One gets absolutely no sense that there are any ordinary people living in Israel or the Occupied Territories.
Few people in this book speak like normal people, and everyone seems to be involved in some secretive group, cabal, or plot. That said, the thriller aspect of the book is a total disappointment, by the end it's hard to really care what happens. Indeed the best moments of tension come 200 pages earlier in a refugee camp on the Gaza Strip. Stone spends much more time on faith than he does actually creating any kind of interesting story, and that's where the book was a real bore for me. Much of the plot revolves around the semi-organized groups of religious weirdoes who are drawn to Jerusalem for obvious reasons. As an agnositc, it was very take any of the book's endless universalist, cabalistic, speechifing seriously. So many of the characters seem to be exceedingly childishly grasping and unthinking in their quest for spiritual enlightenment, that one is hard-pressed to care about them at all. And the central character's wrestling with his half-Jewishness is pretty stale stuff. His love affair with a jazz singer is telegraphed from miles away, proceeds enigmatically, and ends predictably. Why even bother? Indeed, much of the book seems to wander about to no purpose. Stone does provide detailed visual descriptions of people and places, but they never come alive, much like the book itself.