Extraordinary and remarkable, this is the most interesting novel I have read for many years – absorbing, fascinating, challenging, infuriating, moving, utterly compelling. It defies categorisation: part autobiography, part account of the beginnings of Christianity by way of a study of St Paul and St Luke as writers – a treatment of Christianity like no other you have ever seen, with constant references to contemporary politics, psychology, psychotherapy, historical and literary excursions, philosophy, theology and pornography, all seen through the writer’s own experience and personality. He admits that like many men he is into Internet pornography and finds there something beautiful. He is entirely honest and open with his wife about this.
His is a massive ego – but he disarmingly admits that, and understands the limitations and weaknesses of his own self-obsession. He is an immensely successful writer, of novels, biographies, and screenplays, also a film-director, often chosen as a judge at the international film festivals at Cannes and Venice. He is very rich and exults in his popularity and success as well as in his own keen intelligence. He is very much an alpha male, a big man who practises yoga and meditation as well as, significantly, martial arts. He stands on top, one of the powerful of this world – at the opposite extreme from the early Christians and the ideals upheld by Jesus. He has undergone psychotherapy throughout his adult life and continues to do so. As he confesses, he is well aware that from the standpoint of Jesus he is very far from the kingdom of God – in no way would he sell all that he has and give it to the poor.
Carrere grew up as a conventional French Catholic, after his first communion not very observant. However, he enjoyed a warm friendship with his godmother, an extremely devout woman who has written many of the modern hymns sung today in French Catholic churches. From her he has learned about the mystics and the practice of a devout life. Suddenly and unexpectedly in his early maturity he felt ‘touched by grace’ and underwent a conversion experience that changed his life. He married his then partner in the Catholic Church in Cairo, served by the priest through whom his conversion had been channelled, and he had his two sons baptised. He now attended Mass daily, taking frequent communion. He undertook a devotional study of St John’s Gospel on which he meditated daily and filled 18 notebooks with his reflections on it. This intense belief and devotion continued for three years, then it disappeared. He was no longer able to believe. He no longer called himself a Catholic or a Christian, but an agnostic. He came to share Nietzsche’s amazement at how people could still believe the impossibilities of official Christian doctrine.
Carrere is intrigued by extreme situations and by the challenge of opposites. He relishes – and is also disturbed by – the fact that he is so different from the first Christians to whom Paul wrote his letters. You do not have to be clever, wise or rich to become Christian, argued Paul. Very few of you are wise, powerful or noble. (‘Not many wise’ – what a good description that is of humanity in general.). Yet God has chosen what is weak and foolish in the world to shame the wise and the strong (the intellectual Greeks and the Romans whose empire dominates the world). Christians are, as it were, the refuse of the world, the off-scouring of all things. Yet God has chosen the things that are not, to bring to nothing the things that are. (What Paul writes is stunning, says Carrere. No one wrote anything like it before him, neither in Greek philosophy nor in the Bible.) Three hundred years after Paul’s death, incredibly, this came to pass: the slaves (as Nietzsche would say) with their slave mentality and slave religion conquered the Empire.
Being Christian involves making historical and metaphysical claims that Carrere has repudiated as impossible. Yet there are other impossibilities in Christianity that are not purely intellectual, and of which Carrere is always uncomfortably aware. Christianity seeks a widening of human affection and sympathy that goes beyond anything usually thought to be reasonable. It stretches human sympathy and love to the uttermost, to breaking point. This element in Christianity haunts Carrere. He cannot free himself from it. Is it ‘the kingdom’?
Embedded in the novel’s narrative are two extreme stories. The first will appal everyone who reads it. Before a routine session with his psychoanalyst, Carrere reads a short article in the newspaper about a four-year old boy who went into hospital for a minor operation, but an accident with the anaesthetic left him blind, deaf and dumb for life. It is an unbearable story that forces all who read it to face the absolute horror, the unspeakable terror of a little boy who suddenly wakes up plunged for no reason he can possibly understand into eternal darkness that surely only kind and gentle death could assuage. During the session following his reading of this story Carrere weeps uncontrollably. He wants to believe in God, but how can he pray after that? There is no answer. The rest of the book may be seen as an attempt to come to terms with this horror.
A second extreme story concerns a murderer who came to fascinate Carrere. He writes an account of Jean-Claude Romand, who for fifteen years fraudulently posed as a doctor and ended by killing his wife, children, dog, and his parents, also unsuccessfully attempting suicide. Carrere writes the story of his life and holds the dossier relating to the murder investigation and trial. He visits him in prison. (Romand is a model prisoner, no threat). In prison Jean-Claude Romand found refuge in the love of Christ. ‘It was for people like Romand that he had come: collaborators, tax-collectors, psychopaths, paedophiles, hit-and-run drivers, people who talk to themselves in the street, alcoholics, vagrants, skinheads capable of setting vagrants on fire, child abusers, abused children who abuse children in turn when they’re adults.’ Christ’s customers are ‘those who are hated and disdained, and who rightly hate and disdain themselves’.
At the conclusion of the book Carrere reluctantly accepts a challenge from a woman reader to take part in something he finds uncongenial, embarrassing, distasteful, not in character for him. (I will not give away the details of the surprising ending.) There is nothing intellectual here: it is something very simple, elemental, beyond intellect. It is as if the cruelly disfigured Christ frees himself from the cross of death and becomes the beautiful Shiva dancing the dance of life. It may be that Carrere has had a glimpse of the kingdom.
Frank Walker is a retired Unitarian Minister and Teacher whose last ministry was at Cambridge 1976/2000.