Strange ways

Our journey's through life and faith are often strange and convoluted. That certainly appears to be the case for Ann Rice, whose Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt I have just finished reading.

Brought up a cradle Catholic, she exchanged her belief in God for the belief that there is no God while at University in response to her imperative need to read authors that were banned by the Roman Catholic Church. She married a convinced atheist and became famous as the author of popular Vampire novels. Her novels, however, reflected her search for meaning within a personal life touched by tragedy. The combination of her personal search and the research for her novels returned her to the history of Rome and beyond this to the mystery of the survival of the Jews. In 1998 she returned to the Catholic Church. Eventually this led to her own search for the historical Jesus as she read extensively on the subject with the result being the first two novels in her Christ the Lord trilogy.

The first of these is written in simple, sparse prose with the story told in the first person. The storyline incorporates some of the miracles found in the apocryphal infancy gospels but these are mainly restricted to the period in Egypt. The remainder is an imaginative fleshing out of the minimal Gospel stories of Jesus' childhood. Very little happens in terms of action but Rice's dramatisation of Jesus' growing understanding of who he is and what he has to do is effective and moving.

Rice's personal story and the novels written since her return to Catholicism seem to be a reminder of the continuing potency of Christianity in its ability to inspire artists and their work.

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Martyn Joseph - Strange Way.