Gabriel's Mountain

In Taddeo’s (The Supermarket, 1996) novel, a Montreal homeless man is more than he seems.

Amid the hustle and bustle of a slightly futuristic Montreal (there are hover cars, homes wired for surveillance and rumors of robots with cloned human skin), barely anyone notices a homeless man named Gabriel Norson, an amiable soul among the city’s homeless. He’s befriended by spirited teenager Tammy, whose friendship began as rebellion against her parents but soon blossomed into genuine feeling, and by easygoing, open-minded bank worker John. Gabriel leads a nondescript life, but lately, he’s tormented by bad dreams and quasi-mystical visions that seem to stem from the blank stretches he’s always had in the memories of his life. At one point, he finds himself in a hidden cavern populated by mystical children who hint that he’s the inheritor of a great destiny involving spiritual truths long hidden by the Catholic Church and the powers of the world. “The cycle of nature is spun like a wonderful web from which no one escapes,” one of the children tells him. “It sounds more terrible than it is.” Gradually, Gabriel begins to suspect that the crux of his recent afflictions is the time he spent working on his Ph.D. at Berkeley, where he vaguely remembers being hooked up to wires and monitors by people who were studying him for unknown reasons. In a parallel narrative skillfully deployed, readers learn that Gabriel is being hunted by a covert National Security splinter group headed by wunderkind Steve Hamilton, “a tall, broad-shouldered hero of almost comic-book stature.” Hamilton and his team pursue Gabriel because he’s actually a time-traveling fugitive unwittingly bearing knowledge of lost Messianic writings that, if revealed to the world, could cause global upheavals. Much of this is familiar Da Vinci Code territory, but Taddeo presents it all with strong storytelling instincts and expert juggling of the many subplots. While some of those subplots are a little too outlandish for any but hard-core fans of the genre, the narrative more than compensates with its sure-handed conviction.

A fast-paced, thought-provoking spiritual thriller.