Penguin Pbk 2013. £5.51.
What would the life of Jesus have looked like to his mother? Tóibín is not the first writer to challenge the traditional Mary – silent, haloed, ever-virginal, full of sorrow and mercy – but he is arguably one of the most iconoclastic. His Booker-shortlisted novella clearly shows its origins as a theatre monologue; it is entirely in Mary’s voice, shifting between memories of her son and her encounters with the disciples, who now guard her and mine her for details of his life.
Mary treasures memories of Jesus as a boy, with his ‘shy smile’, and their golden family Sabbaths. But he grew up and took up with misfits, ‘fools, twitchers, malcontents, stammerers’, who changed him into someone else, ‘his voice all false, and his tone all stilted’, speaking in ‘high-flown talk and riddles, using strange proud terms to describe himself’. She knows the danger in which he is putting himself, and goes to the Cana wedding to warn him, but realises that ‘he had not even heard me’. She watches the crucifixion in horror and helplessness, wanting only ‘to pretend that this was not happening.’ Towards the disciples who now guard her, she has a mixture of suspicion and gratitude. John repeatedly quizzes her, but he is not looking for truth. He wants ‘sharp simple patterns’, and she realises that ‘he has written of things that neither he nor I saw’. He wants her to fit her story into an already-evolving mythology; in particular, to deny that she ran away from the crucifixion, to save herself from the Romans. But along with her anger at John is a realisation that he will keep the story alive: ‘I know that he has also given shape to what I lived through and he witnessed, and that he has made sure that these words will matter, that they will be listened to’.
In the passage perhaps most shocking to traditional Christians, Mary tells John that nothing can justify Jesus’ death. ‘I can tell you now, when you say he redeemed the world, I will say that it is not worth it.’ When John explains that everyone now has eternal life, she is withering: ‘Oh, eternal life! Oh, everyone in the world!’ This has angered many; reviewers, both positive and negative, say that this is a ‘wholly human’ portrayal of Mary and Jesus, a vision of how things would look if Jesus were not the Son, but only a misguided prophet.
Tóibín’s portrayal is less clear cut to me. Mary hears that Jesus cured the lame and raised Lazarus from the dead (much to Lazarus’ dismay), and seems to reserve judgement as to their truth. She and Mary Magdalene dream identical dreams about Jesus’ resurrection. She also dreams that she stayed to take Jesus down from the cross, and she realises that this dream will soon ‘fill the air and make its way backwards into time and thus become what happened, or what must have happened.’ Her ambivalence, and her resistance to John’s mythologising and theologising, are read by Tóibín’s detractors as an attack on Jesus’ divinity. But how would we expect such an experience to feel, even if it were true? The reaction of traditional Christians suggests that in order for Jesus to truly be the Son of God, he must have been understood as such at the time. They expect Mary to behave, as someone once said of Jesus, ‘as if [she] is always reciting the Nicene Creed under [her] breath’.
But all experience is messy and ambiguous.
Meaning is created in retrospect, and the facts are often shaped to fit the meaning, rather than the other way around. The fact that Mary does not instantly see and appreciate that Jesus is the Son of God can be seen as the gap between the Christ myth and ‘reality’; but it can also be seen as the gap between how reality feels in medias res, and how that reality is shaped and interpreted by the believing community. Unless we actually think people walked around with little golden haloes over their heads, how else could it possibly have happened?
Paƫ Whaley has been a SOF member for almost 20 years. Having Įnally reƟred from her day job of keeping Forum for the Future ‘legal, solvent and a Great Place to Work’, she is happily devoƟng herself to playing the organ and piano, nurturing her herb garden, being Treasurer of AcƟonAid UK and her local string orchestra, houseswapping, tackling her reading list and cooking dinners for Ron. reviews Kathryn Southworth reviews The Land of Gold by SebasƟan Barker Enitharmon (London 2014). Pbk. 125 pages. £9.99.