Jesus novels & films: The Greatest Story Ever Told

Stuart Kelly reviews the latest Jesus novel - The Tongues of Men or Angels by Jonathan Trigell - in today's Guardian and, in the process, provides a neat little summary of the genre:

'Given it has been called The Greatest Story Ever Told, the temptation to retell it is understandable. Except under special circumstances, it also ought to be resisted strenuously. For every Paradise Regained by John Milton, The Monarch by Sir David Lyndsay or Behold the Man by Michael Moorcock, there are misconceived works such as Norman Mailer’s The Gospel According to the Son, Anne Rice’s Christ the Lord books and even Philip Pullman’s The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ (Pullman was so much better at untelling the Bible than retelling it). There have been a remarkable number of fictional Jesuses in recent years – from Colm Toíbín, Naomi Alderman, Michel Faber, JM Coetzee, Jim Crace, Richard Beard (whose Lazarus Is Dead was remarkable). But that’s not so surprising given that Robert Graves, Gore Vidal, Anthony Burgess, José Saramago, Jorge Luis Borges, Mikhail Bulgakov and even Jeffrey Archer have all had a crack of this particular whip.'

Jordan Hoffman says of the latest Jesus movie, Last Days in the Desert starring Ewan McGregor as both Jesus and the shadowy personification of a taunting Satan, 'is a smart and beautiful meditation of fathers and sons (and the Father and Son) that is slow but never boring':

'On the spectrum of Jesus movies this belongs closer to Pasolini’s Gospel According to Matthew than, say, Nicholas Ray’s King of Kings, at least in its ascetic aesthetic. Certainly more than the recent wretched Mark Burnett and Roma Downey production Son of God. The off-book exploration will, I think, be of value to believers, but that’s an issue for the film’s marketing department. As an artwork about a man with a calling, the rich, hazy time spent in the desert certainly inspires.'

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Larry Norman - The Outlaw.

Jesus is having a moment in literary fiction

The Guardian's ShortCutsBlog finds Jesus as a trending topic in literary fiction:

"Jesus is having a moment in literary fiction. Novelists can't get enough of him. In September 2012, Naomi Alderman's The Liars' Gospel was published – a month before Tóibín's book. The year before that came Richard Beard's Lazarus is Dead, and before that Philip Pullman's The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ. More allegorically, JM Coetzee's Childhood of Jesus appeared earlier this year.

"There have definitely been more novels about Jesus recently," says Stuart Kelly, who is on the judging panel for this year's Booker. He thinks they might be a reaction to the current situation in the Middle East, or "the gauche and strident atheism of the likes of [Richard] Dawkins. People can argue what they like about the new atheism, but what it doesn't do is explain why this story has had such a hold over the human imagination for 2,000 years."

The conclusion of the piece makes a strikingly valid point based on the polyphony found in the Gospels and beyond:

"Perhaps the story of Jesus's life bears novelistic reiteration partly because it has always been told by multiple voices – not only Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, but many more whose versions were not included in the Bible.

That duplication and overlapping of narratives must create holes and folds in which novelists can work, to narrativise the contradictions and build new worlds in the gaps."

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Bruce Cockburn - Cry Of A Tiny Babe.