The Liars' Gospel

By Naomi Aldermann

Published by Penguin, 2012

 Judas, by Lady Gaga (from Vevo).

Her interpretation of a demonic Judas contrasts with Alderman's  less vital interpretation.

Tendentiousness undermines an attempt at retelling the Jesus myth in a naturalistic manner.

Jesus, Moses and even God are literary characters and creations. They may, if you are a believer, also have a different kind of reality, but whatever else they may be, they are characters in stories.

This is a reimagining of the Jesus story. It assumes, reasonably, a familiarity with the outlines of this story, but the characters are unhelpfully given names different to their common English ones – so Jesus becomes Jehoshuah, his mother is Miryam, etc. Oddly Pilate retains his English name, and is not called Pilatus.  

This mild distancing effect suggests anxiety that the story might be seen as blasphemous or shocking; but the only shock I encountered (admittedly as an unbeliever) had nothing to do with the representation of Jesus.  

In telling Jesus’ story indirectly, from the perspectives of his mother, of Judas, of the Jerusalem High Priest and of Barrabas, we are drawn into the wider contemporary context of the story, in particular the political situation in and around Jerusalem. 

This historical part of the work is done well. The atmosphere of occupied Jerusalem is skilfully evoked, and the narrative is lively, bookended by descriptions of the original Roman conquest through to the destruction of the city in  the first century CE.

But this aspect of the novel is also the most shocking. For Jerusalem is currently at the heart of a similar conflict. Given that the current oppressors claim authority as descendents of the Jews of this novel, this novel appears to provide historical justification for Israel’s current brutal oppression in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (and more widely across modern Israel). 

I don’t know if Alderman intends this; it may be that she intends rather to show that violent oppression begets violence, unless somehow we understand Jesus’ unique addition to Rabbinic teachings, ‘love your enemy’. 

Perhaps readers are supposed to link the practices of the ancient Romans with those of current Israelis; but I didn't get that impression, nor does the treatment of the central focus of this novel suggest that the author was aiming for irony.

The central focus of the novel is Jesus' ministry, and this is is significantly weaker because the author seems to be pushing her views on us at every opportunity.

On moral grounds, I am unhappy with the parrallels to the current situation in Israel; on aesthetic grounds, this treatment isunobjectionable. The reverse is true when it comes to the treatment of the Jesus myth.

A novel centred on Jesus is a formidable challenge, for the realist novel can – perhaps must – humanise everyone. This is a poor option for mythic figures, even those nobody directly worships, such as Ulysses. Any attempt to realistically convey, for example, Jesus' childhood in a novel would frustrate even the most orthodox Christian.

The author sensibly retains some of the strangeness of the Jesus myth, particularly of the earliest retelling of it we have, the disturbing Gospel of Mark. She stresses the human and apocalyptic aspects of the myth.

In so far as there must be some demythologising in an historical, realist, novel, the author seems to have adopted a conservative approach, allowing a reader to believe in Jesus’ divinity, or at least that he was an important spiritual teacher. 

Oddly, some of the most problematic aspects of the myth, from the viewpoint of ‘realism’, are retained. I think this is a bold idea, but it results in the novel’s weakest scene.

Miracles are accepted (albeit judiciously). Visions are accepted, so that Judas may have been blessed by Jesus before his betrayal. Nobody knows what happens to Jesus’ body, leaving resurrection a possibility.

Confronting the Greek-writing, perhaps self-hating Jewish apostles, Alderman goes horribly wrong in attempting to reimagine the trial of Jesus. Its important for the historical fiction strand of the novel that we experience a Jewish freedom fighter / terrorist, and this is a good idea for explaining Barrabas’ popularity with the crowd, but why would Pilate ever agree to allow the harmless Jesus to be executed over such a trophy as a resistance leader?

I found Alderman completely implausible here, and this undermines her attempt at realism. The canonical gospels are much more effective here – and since we know crowds can be extremely nasty, there are no moral reasons why the author should try to exonerate the crowd that condemned Jesus.

 

Lest I seem perverse in suggesting that the scene quoted in all manner of anti-semitism (christ-killing) is aesthetically and morally unobjectionable, I must add that all that is needed is to show that this was a typical crowd, rather than a crowd of Jews, as if being Jewish were the important distinction.

I regard it self-evident that it is possible to give a plausible explanation for Jesus’ condemnation that did not imply anything negative about Jewish people (or judaism) in general. I don't mean to downplay the gospel author's genuine anti-semitism, but this is from their perspective a happy coincidence arising from their pragmatic aesthetic choice.

The Greek Testament scene(s) of choice between Jesus and Barrabas is an aesthetic triumph and a moral disaster (at least in retrospect). Taken as art, these are the scenes that grant something like tragic eminence to the myth, and are responsible for much of the regrettably continuing appeal of Christianity. In life, they are linked to the continuing anti-semitism responsible for so much misery.

Perhaps the greatest mystery in Christian religion is not how Jesus can be both God and man, but how a loving Jew can symbolise a religion that has and does persecute Jews.

While the desire to provide an alternative interpretation to these scenes is extremely understandable, the implausible reinterpretation here is a major aesthetic mistake.

This tendentiousness, the intense desire to tell us that the Jesus myth has been a disaster for Jewish people, bedevils the entire novel.

 

If the novel is judged a contribution to refute antisemitism, or to informing believing and non-believing Christians / gentiles of the rich tradition within which Jesus existed, then it is a success, notwithstanding my reservations about modern Israel mentioned above. 

If the novel is judged as art, it is a failure. Someone – an Inuit hermit? – unfamiliar with the Jesus myth would wonder why it mattered, whereas reading Mark’s gospel, or certainly John’s, would surely understand its splendour, while disliking its racism, among many other things.

Although her writing style is normally admirable in concision and beauty, Alderman tends to characterise the four central subjects similarly – sympathetically, as intelligent, wise and courageous, albeit on different sides. While some dark humour enlivens proceedings, I wanted greater variety of character; perhaps the High Priest could have been a more comical figure unaware of his weaknesses, etc. 

Sometimes, the author’s desire to convince us of her central thesis betrays her style – an observation that couldn’t occur to the character (perhaps because it refers to things before they were born, or when they weren’t present) intrudes on the narrative. 

The most disastrous intrusion of authorial voice rather than character voice happens in the last two pages of the novel, and I would suggest readers simply stop before then. I can’t imagine the reader who would need the point battered so much that the last pages would be worth reading .

Overall, then, an interesting failure. Perhaps Alderman can now tackle a less mythical, yet much more significant early Christian Jew: Paul. I think she could achieve great things with this subject more congenial to a novel.

Dickens' house museum

27 December 2012

Mr Fezziwig's ball, an illustration from A Christmas Carol.
This image of conviviality is what we've inherited from Dickens' view of Christmas.
Yet it effectively exists only in Scrooge's imagined happy past life.
It's how Scrooge chose, and chooses to respond to this vision that matters.

The reopening of his house museum is an opportunity to evaluate Dickens’ highly idiosyncratic views on Christmas. 

Dickens didn’t invent the nineteenth century obsession with Christmas, but this year, his two hundredth birthday, it is worth reflecting on how much he popularised the event, and what it seems to have meant for him. 

While he decorated yuletide with all the trimmings, and these trimmings are what we continue to associate with this time of year, his central interest was very different, and not at all Christian, though he might have objected to this. 

He perceived Christmas as a time of ghosts, both in the form of subjects of scary stories and metaphorically as a time for remembering our past life and perhaps changing our future approach based on this consideration. The Christmas Carol accommodates both these aspects, and when haunted Scrooge returns to the wonderment and imagination of his youth, the power of this imagination rejuvenates him.  

For Dickens, then, Christmas was principally a time when the imagination could work on us, and although his Christmas stories have the conventional happy ending, as with Scrooge, there is always the possibility that its workings will have a negative effect, as when we think on deaths in the family. 

The Dickens house museum, located in one of his early London residences, reopened in December just in time to capture those wishing to celebrate both the man and his connection with Christmas. 

The house was closed in order to extend the amenities, and allow more people to experience the original house. Nonetheless over the holiday period the house was extremely crowded, which limits the enjoyment.

It also suffers from the curse of all new museums – the interactives don’t work, nor is the guidebook back from the printers yet. Oh well, those wrinkles will be sorted out. 

Otherwise, I had mixed feelings. Too much focuses on what is referred to as Dickens’ sympathy with the poor, unparalleled in his time. Perhaps Dickens felt sympathy with the poor, though it would be hard to tell from his writing about them, always external to their situation, always sentimentalising much as he did with everyone.  

Moralist critics of Dickens, starting with his mentor Thomas Carlyle, have always complained about his sentimentality. These critics may miss the point, but they are at least accurate, unlike his moralist supporters, who claim that he was a champion of the oppressed.

The upper floor of this house is dedicated to this vision of Dickens, wildly wrong as would be observed by anyone simply reading how he described his temporary confinement to a blacking factory as a child, the great trauma of his life.  

 

In these words, he shows no sympathy for his fellow workers, most of whom were there for much longer than he. Rather, he is concerned that nobody noticed he was destined for much better things, as indeed, he was.

He knew his genius; he followed it; and on the side, like anyone with scruples, he expressed concern for the plight of the poor, though it had nothing to do with his talent, nor was it something he focussed upon unduly.

Dickens combined a vivid imagination (natively amoral, but trained into a conventional strict morality) with a love of theatre, especially comedy, and of conviviality combined with hard work. It is this mixture that produces what is distinctively great about his writing, which has almost nothing in common with that of any writer of his time.

Some of his strengths are reflected in the exhibits here. A playbill from one of his private performances of a Wilkie Collins melodrama (and notable, a farce afterwards). A dining room where we’re told he somehow entertained 18 people, which must have been very cosy, and a feat worthy of his Pickwick.

 

What a pity that here, as elsewhere, what is most important about Dickens, what makes him live, is buried amongst a focus on poverty that, if we seek for it in his works, does neither the author nor his current readers any credit.

Orpheus: The song of life

Ann Wroe

Published by Pimlico, 2011



Lamentation d'Orphée by Alexandre Séon (1896)

 An innovative prose poem biography that doesn't explain this hero's mysterious appeal.

 
I'm late reviewing this book, which was published in 2011, but I couldn't leave the London Olympics year without at least one review relevant to Ancient Greece...

In the future, we may feel this book is a pioneer of Wikipedia world, a product of our current Light Age, where so much information is available that organising it will be a work of art in itself. I suppose this raises the question of whether Google is a work of art, but I will leave that aside. 

Orpheus, the singer who descended to the underworld and returned, may seem a relatively simple hero of the ancient Western world, his story a convenient model for composers. But his mystery cult in ancient Greece influenced Plato and was once felt to be a harbinger of Christianity. For this if nothing else he deserves this innovative biography. 

I see nothing wrong in writing a biography of myth. While we’re certain that nobody ever heard Orpheus play his lyre, and are equally certain that many people heard Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, nobody we know has heard either, and artists and biographers are required in both cases to interpret. 

Wroe organises her facts under seven themes (or strings to Orpheus’ lyre), arranged broadly in a standard life cycle. So a section on love precedes a section on death. The material in each section is necessarily drawn from a wide range of sources, far-flung chronologically, geographically and linguistically. 

We get ancient Greek figure vases, ancient Roman poetry, early Christian philosophy, medieval romances,  renaissance paintings, modern films, and of course operas. The variety is bewildering, and the author cannot intend us to remember, for example, whether  contemporary readers of Orpheus on the Argonautica also knew of his love for Eurydice. 

Less a detached biography than a love song, the prose is breathless and poetic, as if the narrator were reciting one of Orpheus' hymns. We gain a unifying image of Orpheus out of the chaos, and he would seem to be the narrator’s wish-fulfilment, a beautiful non-sexual sensitive young man who is too wise to be truly attached to anything or anyone, though this only makes it easier to fall hopelessly in love with him. 

Sometimes, the narrator references something that wouldn’t be so easily located on wikipedia, such as a busker on the London Underground, singing to the shades that pass him, perhaps searching for his Eurydice. I wish there were more of these lateral references in this book; as it is, we are given Orpheus ‘straight’.  

Even here, though, some of his mystery has been conveyed better by other writers.  

The German poet Rilke features prominently in this book, with regular quotes from his Sonnets to Orpheus. Yet Wroe doesn’t seem aware of Erich Heller’s wonderful essay on Rilke and Nietzsche, in which Orpheus becomes for the poet something like a composite of Apollo and Dionysus for the philosopher. 

This is the biggest disappointment with the biography. It presents the facts in an entertaining manner, but doesn’t attempt to explain Orpheus’ significance, especially his significance to us, now. The affirmation of life in spite of its horror; the role of style in mediating between Dionysus’ indivisible terrifying truth and Apollo’s false yet beautiful mastery; all of this goes unmentioned.

But perhaps the book itself is an attempt to achieve that style, that balance. The last line, involving a coffee cup, cake and primroses, might suggest this.

 

On the whole, though, I feel Orpheus keeps his mysteries.

The Casual Vacancy

JK Rowling

Published by little, brown book group, 2012

 

Part of the Forest of Dean (UK), apparently the model for Rowling's Pagford.
According to Robert McCrum in the Guardian.

Teenage angst in a small town with big problems, this 'condition of England' novel is weakened by an unecessary lunge towards tragedy.

It’s not embarrassing, nor is it masterful. It is decent, and worthy, and though I resented reading this when I could be reading greater works, it moved me, and so was a distinct improvement over the author’s previous work. 

The startling success of the Harry Potter series  still needs explaining, for Rowling wasn’t exactly original, crossing Enid Blyton’s Famous Five with Tolkeinesque fantasy. Maybe that particular mix was original, though I think rather that the growth of the characters over the books contributed more than other factors to the series’ success.  

That growth from childhood to adolescence continues . The latest novel is not quite aimed at adults, whomever we might be, despite the publishers hype. The central characters are teenage school students, and the conflicts are between these young people and their parents.  

So this is more of a teenage novel, or a novel for parents of teenagers. These relationships are presented believably, though I think my idea of believable might be drawn from TV soap opera, and so too Rowling. 

In any case, although the parent-child relationships are the most memorable aspect of this novel, Rowling has a frame – and plot – within which to showcase these relationships.  

The setting is a rural village with a housing estate on its outskirts, and the plot contains a political battle to either retain or detach responsibility for this estate. Given her huge potential readership, this is a commendable subject, and broadly speaking the author’s sympathies are in the right place. She gives a voice to the wretched and oppressed, while not sentimentalising them. 

A sort of sentimentality does creep in though, and it can be found tainting the representation of the major villains, the village old guard. They are presented as grotesque in almost every way, and the author ensures they receive a 'poetic' comeuppance.

More problematically, the plot climaxes with a double death on the estate. For the first, of the toddler Robbie, we feel nothing, as he remains throughout a cipher, symbolising the failures of both his family and our care system, or, from a different angle, the last remaining hope of his half-sister Krystal. She is a more substantial character, and her subsequent suicide is clearly supposed to have a tragic sense.

Krystal’s suicide doesn’t achieve tragedy, though it is moving. She too must receive punishment for her behaviour as we have seen it in the novel. She has been reckless, epicurean, resentful, and leading good young men astray. Her punishment is as just as that of the reactionary grotesques who despise her. 

Wait a minute. I’m sure this wasn’t Rowling’s intention. We must be supposed to feel remorse at her death, as the other characters do. Somehow we have failed her, this potentially brilliant young woman, who simply needed a little help in life. 

That both of the previous paragraphs might be true needn’t be a problem – ambiguous cruelty is the very heart of tragedy. But I felt that Rowling wasn’t trying to be ambiguous, and so in the end wasn’t in control of her material. Again, this needn’t be a problem, as some of the greatest artworks seem to have operated counter to their makers’ intentions, but here the effect is in the opposite direction, of bathos rather than pathos.

If the plot doesn’t quite work, the pacing is fast and clear. It’s easy to criticise Rowling’s style, but in focussing on plot she deflects this criticism. She isn’t a stylist, but many stylists can leave the reader bored. She isn’t a literary genius, but it is hard to detect these among living authors, so I don’t think this can be a serious criticism of her.

I’m hoping her next novel will focus on adults, with teenagers and children secondary. Here, when the focus is on adult relationships, disbelief is poorly suspended. 

Grimm Tales

Translated and edited by Philip Pullman

Published by Penguin

Watts' nineteenth century image of Little Red Riding Hood. From here.
Charles Dickens apparently claimed she was his first love...

A selection of the best of the disturbing tales recounted to the Grimms, elegantly transated and with an insightful commentary.

Although they are usually called ‘fairy tales’ in English, I prefer the original Grimm title, translated here as ‘folk and house tales’, though I believe the term has a broader meaning of ‘community tales’. And this is how I read them – not primarily as stories aimed for an audience of children.

These short stories are unsophisticated, and even the best are very slight works of art. Many have the kernel of greater artworks within them (most famously Snow White and Cinderella, but even better Hansel and Gretel), or they have tapped into such a universal nightmare that, like the tales of Poe, they can be retold in powerful variants (Little Red Riding Hood).

But the greatest interest for me in these tales is that they surely reflect certain attitudes in communities centuries ago, with which we now find difficulty empathising. Hierarchies appear divinely ordained, with kings only rarely questioned. These are stories with what could be described as an authoritarian setting, though the anarchic elements could equally be seen as subverting this setting, albeit weakly.

And the family unit is as often a source of abuse as comfort, with parents all the way up the social ladder acting appallingly to their children.

For these reasons, and others, the Grimm brothers and their successors linked these tales to a medieval, proto-nationalistic mindset. As the nationalism concerned was German, we now find the Grimms’ ideas as difficult as the assumptions lurking in the tales themselves.

This may explain why Philip Pullman doesn’t address these aspects in his otherwise informative introduction to this selection of 50 of the tales. Perhaps he also wants to avoid a sociological reading of the tales, as this can seem to compete with the basic joy of the storytelling. Nonetheless, in describing some of the aspects of the stories, such as their lack of psychological depth, I felt some of the uncanniest aspects are precisely those that might seem sociological.

Put a different way, some of the strongest, strangest experiences when reading these tales are not covered by Pullman in his introduction. This is a serious omission – I think the reception of these tales, and how they continue to influence our view of the medieval, despite being transcribed in the nineteenth century, are intrinsic to their literary value.
 

Otherwise, the book is wonderful. Pullman succeeds in translations that are ‘clear as water’ and happily adapts the stories whenever he feels he can do a better job… so this edition is not suitable for pedants.

The comments at the end of each story are worth the price of the book in themselves, as we get the editor’s views on why and how the story works, what weaknesses it might contain, and so on. And it struck me that everyone would benefit from these notes, pedants or not.