‘Damascus’ by Christos Tsiolkas: The first four pages

On the opening page of “Damascus”, by Christos Tsiolkas, guards have placed a hood over a woman’s head. She is in darkness. And what is this woman thinking about at this moment? Well, the hood’s smell, apparently. Even though this woman is under guard and in darkness, she “takes fleeting comfort” from the fact that the hood smells of sheep and goats, because they have been her companions for much of her life, “her solace and her bed, … her work and her friends”.

This moment of “fleeting comfort” quickly passes, however, as the woman smells something else inside the hood: “fear”. It seems there’s quite a mix of smells inside this hood, but by good luck they make themselves known sequentially. And what is the woman’s next thought after the discovery of this “fear” smell? Well, it’s “How many others has this hood covered?” — which, at face value, might not be completely illogical because it turns out “the stink of (others’) terror is soaked through the fibres”. Er…

By now I’m two paragraphs into the novel, and already I’m becoming a tad worried that I may have entered one of these “historical” novels where the author’s desire to tell me amazing stuff about the past I had absolutely no idea about (like people lived in close proximity to their animals, or men treated women abominably) is going to trump even the most rudimentary requirements of realism.

By the end of third paragraph, I’ve learned that this captive woman (with a hood over her head) has fallen “into calmness” after praying to her Lord.

In the fourth, the woman’s hood is removed, and she sees she is in the middle of a circle of men holding rocks, while crows and vultures wheel above her. It is only when the woman recognises that she is standing on “accursed ground”, however, that “fear reclaims her” and she wets herself.

As matters will turn out, though we don’t know this yet, this woman has known since well before the opening paragraph that the Jewish authorities have accused her of adultery after she left her husband and joined a group of Jesus followers. From the moment the hood was thrown over her head, she has known she faces likely or certain execution by stoning.

Under such circumstances, I find it hard to believe that this woman would have taken even fleeting “comfort” from the goaty smell of the hood thrown over her head, or that once she became aware of the hood’s alleged smell of “fear” (an already unlikely idea in itself) she would have proceeded to ask herself how many others this hood had covered.

By presenting the woman’s circumstance in this way, Tsiolkas is putting a humane but thoughtful reader in an almost impossible position. Of course I feel I should be moved by this woman’s dreadful situation and fate — but at the same time, am I supposed not to notice how clumsy and authorially self-serving Tsiolkas’ description of this woman’s experience is?

After this initial setting up is complete, Tsiolkas’ description of the woman’s execution is presented to us through a confusing mix of points of view:

One of the men steps forward. ‘Shut your ungodly mouth!’

She spins to face the speaker and as she does the first rock smashes her shoulder. She stumbles and falls. A rock slams into her neck, it steals her breath. Another rips open her brow. And then she hears the crack of the world splitting, as if the heavens above are tearing. There is darkness. There is blood in her mouth. There is a pain so terrible that she knows it is not the world that is breaking but her own body.

And then the darkness lifts and there is light.

The men keep hurling the rocks but the girl is dead and so justice is done.

Tsiolkas begins this passage using a third person distant point of view, but is soon trying to lead us through the woman’s pain (third person close point of view) as she experiences it. I say trying because Tsiolkas doesn’t actually pull this off. Failing to make any emotional impact, he turns his rhetorical amp up to 12 (sorry Spinal Tap), reaching for “darkness” and “light” — which, along with “stench”, will turn out to be some of Tsiolkas’ main go-to words in this novel — and then we get the grandiloquent “crack of the world splitting” and “it is not the world that is breaking”. What could have been a simple, moving account of a lethal, legally sanctioned male assault upon a lone woman ends up being (to me anyway) insultingly unaffecting.

A novel or film often gives away its essential qualities within the first couple of minutes of our acquaintance with it. In fact, I would say the opening four pages of “Damascus”, if anything, flatter the novel as a whole, which to my ears becomes more and more hysterical, and less and less psychologically credible, as it proceeds.

“Damascus” clearly has many fans among literary heavyweights and ordinary readers alike, and I’m aware that in expressing the views I have set out here I may have set myself up to receive a metaphorical stoning myself.

If that should happen, I do hope the moment the hood is thrown over my head I will at least have the decency to respond with abject terror, and not waste everybody’s time rambling on about goat smells.