Abstract
Colm Tóibín, The Testament of Mary, Viking Adult: London, 2012; 112 pp.: 9780670922093, £12.99 (hbk); Penguin: London, 2013; 112 pp.: 9780241962978, £7.99 (pbk)
For those with even a small degree of knowledge of biblical studies, a suspension of disbelief is required from the beginning of this novella. There are shadows of the twentieth century in the house arrest and disciples’ rewriting of history at the offset, the solidarity of women among Mary, her neighbour and her statue of Artemis, and her views on weddings. There is also an immediate reminder that the writers of history (and theology) are unreliable, delivered by an unreliable narrator. But this is not a straightforward secularized pseudo-biography of Jesus. If anything it is an imaginative exercise in thinking the part of the suffering, grieving mother, and it is an answer to the question the protagonist asks herself: ‘how I could have watched and remained still and silent’ (p. 77). It is written as a passion of Mary as ‘memory fills my body as much as blood and bones’. Her failure to protect her son leads her to unending remembering of the events, just as it leads to the disciples’ Orwellian recreation of it.
In general, biographies of Jesus tend to reveal more of their times and authors than bring fresh reflection on the gospel. Charles Dickens’s The Life of Our Lord, written for children, speaks of kindness, an attention to the poor, and a concern with the social causes of sin. The final paragraph begins ‘REMEMBER! – It is christianity TO DO GOOD always’. Piety is private. Religion is humbly doing good, an ethos of his times and novels. Leo Tolstoy’s The Gospel in Brief shares this concern for moral education and the inner-life, but takes another nineteenth-century sentiment, largely demythologizing the story. Since then humanists and atheists have severally secularized the gospel entirely. More recently, however, even the most astringent atheists have been less interested in debunking miracles. Atheist-Marxist Pasolini did not feel the need to disturb The Gospel according to St Matthew. Saramago’s Gospel according to Jesus Christ infamously attacks theism but without retracting the miraculous. And the delight in finding new ways of telling the story, continues unabated. In 2012 appeared Naomi Alderman’s The Liars’ Gospel, which included a section from the perspective of Mary.
Tóibín’s account is sparsely bleaker and more disturbing, but stands in the same tradition. Unlike the materialist New Atheists the postmodern gospel has no need of ousting the inexplicable, even as it plays with its story, theology and politics. Tóibín’s strategy is to usurp and bring new focus on what Erich Auerbach referred to as the ‘unexpressed ‘background’ in biblical literature, here the gospel narrative. Most memorably, he parodies resurrection with a zombified Lazarus (pp. 35–7), coaxing with the familiar word and then twisting with the uncanny; just as he draws back from Mary’s most iconic pieta and resurrection encounter, leaving only darkness and dreams. Perhaps then it is the legacy of the Cold War, perhaps the Troubles, or twenty-first century terrorism and Arab Springs, that Tóibín plays out in the ambiguity of truth and the fear in Mary of revolutionary politics; in the bureaucratic disciples, enmeshed in power and hierarchy; in the hysteria and extremism that confuse perception and climax with the theatricality of a show trial. But we should remember that The Testament of Mary does not stand in the tradition of the Gospels but pseudo-gospels. This gives us a different set of questions to consider; questions concerning the reliability of authorship, the intensity of human experience in extremism and revolution, and the background tensions at the moment of writing