Most of us know of Damascus mainly in the context of St Paul and the moment of his conversion to Christianity – at that point still no more than an outlawed sect in its raw infancy – as described in the Acts of the Apostles: ‘And as he journeyed he came near Damascus: and suddenly there shined round about him a light from Heaven: and he fell to the earth …’ The cover of Tsiolkas’s new novel features Caravaggio’s 1601 painting Conversion on the Way to Damascus, which, like this novel, puts heavy emphasis on the physicality of spiritual experience. Here is Tsiolkas’s version of this moment:

He is racked by tremors, his bones as fragile as the empty shells of the sea. He lurches upright, reaching for the radiance, for heat and for succour, but as soon as he does the light is gone and all is darkness. He falls away from his body and from the world but not before he hears the voice …

Tsiolkas is a harsh poet of the body, and this novel resembles his previous work in its preoccupation with bodily functions and experience, and in its insistence on keeping flesh and blood to the fore. There is one particular virtuoso passage in which we hear from one of the several narrators, a damaged Roman soldier called Vrasas, as he and two other former soldiers sacrifice a bullock to the gods in hope of their prayers being answered. This is a four-page stream of consciousness, violent and ecstatic and drenched in blood and guts and fire, that must have been even more exhausting for Tsiolkas to write than it was for me to read. Damascus is a visionary novel full of wild energy and passion, but it is not for the faint-hearted.

Christos Tsiolkas (photograph via © Philippe MATSAS/Opale)

Apart from the vivid, brutal, pagan figure of Vrasas, and of course Paul himself, other characters who loom large in the telling of this story include Lydia of Macedonia, an early convert whose faith is total and who has made the turning of the other cheek into an art form, and the Saints Timothy and Thomas. Thomas is an intriguing figure in this novel, presented here as Christ’s actual twin but also as his shadow side, for Thomas is a robust and earthy pragmatist, the ‘doubting Thomas’ who could not believe in the Resurrection.

As with Dead Europe (2005), Tsiolkas’s new novel takes a sweeping international perspective, in contrast to his début novel, Loaded (1995), The Slap (2008), or Barracuda (2013), all of which drill down into particular social and moral landscapes of contemporary Australian society. While the subject matter and setting of Damascus are departures from Tsiolkas’s previous novels, his themes remain the same: class and power, masculinity and sexuality, violence and cruelty. The teachings of Jesus are set in stark contrast to the realities of this society, where any act of generosity or gentleness is swept away by the cross-currents of instinctive hostility and brutally exercised power. Paul himself is represented as a tortured figure, a self-hating homosexual, and a lecherous drunk, who wrestles till the end of his life with various deadly sins: ‘for my jealousy, for my pride, for my spite … Saul laughs at his own vanity; one more sin to be forgiven.’

Reading this novel requires a balancing act from the reader: to keep track of its characters and follow its sometimes disorienting narrative trail by recalling whatever one knows or remembers of the New Testament, and at the same time to remember that Tsiolkas is taking the sorts of liberties a biblical reimagining requires, as no doubt Geraldine Brooks found in writing The Secret Chord (2015) or Colm Tóibín in writing The Testament of Mary (2012). In an author’s note to this novel, Tsiolkas makes the distinction between historian and storyteller, and in doing so gives the reader an indication of one of his purposes in writing it:

If Judea had not fallen to Roman occupation and siege, if the temple in Jerusalem had not been destroyed, it is possible that Christians would have remained a forgotten Jewish sect. Such speculation is tantalising for an historian, but as a storyteller what I want to convey is the catastrophic consequences of that war and occupation on the refugees who survived the annihilation of their homelands.

The novel’s further message for us concerns the teachings of Christ, with their emphasis on justice and compassion, on generosity and mercy and equality, in our own time when so many self-proclaimed Christians in powerful places have moved so far away from these ideals.