A jet-setting doctor named Angel performs surgery in the war zones of Beirut before his mysterious kidnapping. A reincarnated English king named Richard the Lionheart travels modern-day Middle Eastern battlefields, dreaming blood-spattered dreams of his failed crusade to take Jerusalem 800 years ago.

These are just two of the wondrous ciphers who wander through the ghost-scape realism of Simon Louvish’s ambitious 10th novel. Meanwhile, the middle-class Westerners – another half dozen “characters” who fret on the sidelines of The Days of Miracles and Wonders – are bound up in paroxysms of guilt that render all their concerns meaningless. This theme, restated in various ways, culminates when one Danny Hohenlohe finally manages to act on his plot to murder the London editor who rejected his book. In Danny we see morality as just another bad joke told over cocktails at the right party. This is in contrast to the heroics of the Angel, and the awakenings of the guilt-ridden King. But they, unlike Danny, are more figments than characters, unwilling travellers, restless wanderers who find no more or less solace in Scotland and London than in Lebanon, Syria, and Israel.

As strange as all this might be for the Canadian reader unfamiliar with the work of this Scottish born Israeli-British author, it would seem that Louvish is plundering familiar territory. Not only do the settings seem drawn from the author’s experience, but so do his loquacious stylings; reviewers have compared his previous novels to the works of Heller, Vonnegut, and Pynchon. Indeed, this 10th book seems to exist in a strange place where Catch-22 meets Slaughter House Five under a Pynchon-esque rainbow with no pot of gold at the end. Had this work been pared down to its essentials, characters like the King and the Angel might have embodied a humanism as timeless and hilarious as many of the great novels about life during war. As it stands, this novel more accurately reflects the Desert Storm madness the author uses as the backdrop to his many interlocking tales. No wonder the characters who make up this novel remain as impersonal as the bullet-like sentences of the author’s machine-gun prose.

Like its ponderous title, this is an unwieldy novel, the sort of book one admires but does not particularly like. Its scope is impressive, and its dark satire articulates a courageous perspective and a willingness to push the assembled cast into the firing lines. The parts of this novel that work are the parts in which Louvish has taken the time to create distinctive moments where “real” characters occupy the moral imperative, turning plots into stories and words into resounding cries. But the moment upon which the 560 pages of this novel hinges, the moment at which the readers and writers, the kings and angels, are irretrievably connected by the horrific beauty of this too small world – that moment never seems to come. And, as if he could ever make up for such a shortcoming, the author imitates the ugly events of recent history by pressing on, page after page, groping for the one miracle that might supersede all the other wonders.