Acts of the Assassins and Jesus Novels

Philip Hensher's review for The Guardian of Acts of the Assassins by Richard Beard is interesting for three reasons. First, he understands the significance of the use made in the Bible of multiple narratives:

"Christianity is unusual among religions in being founded on different ways of telling the same story. As early as the late second century, theologians were denouncing Christians who tried to limit the story of Christ to a single telling, and by the fifth century, the canonical account had been reduced to four accounts and no fewer. The lives of the four evangelists, with their different emphases, were surrounded by different non-canonical accounts, such as the second-century Gospel of Judas, that anyone with a sense of curiosity can investigate without a sense of impiety."

Second, he provides a helpful summary of the best of recent Jesus novels:

"In recent years, novelists have seized on this narrative multiplicity to tell the story in their own way ... we have seen novels such as Jim Crace’s Quarantine, Naomi Alderman’s The Liars’ Gospel, Philip Pullman’s The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, CK Stead’s My Name Was Judas and Colm Tóibín’s The Testament of Mary. There are very many more of much less compelling quality than these, the best of the bunch ... Most of the Jesus-centred new fiction retells the familiar story of Christ from an unrecorded viewpoint, whether Mary, Mary Magdalene, Judas (very often) or Jesus himself."

Third, he senses that the novel's narrative and style ultimately views the resurrection as being a story that we cannot simply explain away:

"Beard ... embarks upon the gloriously futile project of telling the story of Jesus’s death and resurrection, and the subsequent martyrdom of all the disciples, one by one, in the manner of a police procedural, with a hapless gumshoe trying to track down the killer before he gets any further down the list of victims.

This is, of course, extraordinarily funny ... Applying the rational genre of the crime thriller to the magical defiance of the gospel narratives results in some alternative possibilities ... as the novel goes on, it becomes touching, futile, thoughtful. What is the mystery of Christ’s resurrection and the joyful walk towards martyrdom but a narrative that we can only gaze at and realise the inadequacies of our tools for explanation?"

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Lauryn Hill - The Passion.

The strong meat of short stories

In the light of Alice Munro's Nobel Prize for Literature there has not only been analysis of her skill as a writer of short stories but also much reflection on the nature of short stories themselves.

Colm Tóibín writes of Alice Munro that her "genius is in the construction of the story. She has a way of suggesting, both in the cadences and the circumstances, that nothing much is going to happen, that her world is ordinary and her scope is small. And then in a story such as "Runaway", she manages to suggest a fierce loneliness, and begins to dramatise the most unusual motives and actions. Slowly, there is nothing ordinary at all. I would love to see her drafts, or the inside of her mind as she works, because my feeling is that this takes a great deal of erasing, adding, taking risks, pulling back, taking time."

Sarah Hall, who won a £15,000 prize for a short story in the same week Alice Munro won the Nobel, writes that "They are excruciatingly difficult to produce and make effective. The best provoke potent sensations in the reader – discomfort, arousal, exhilaration, fear. They are as powerful and memorable, in some cases more so, than novels."

She continues by saying that "Short stories are often strong meat. Reading them, even listening to them, can be challenging, by which I do not mean hard work, simply that a certain amount of nerve and maturity is required. Often the experience is exquisitely unsettling; one might feel like a voyeur suddenly looming at the window of an intimate scene. At first glance normal-seeming events are taking place, but mundanity gives way to the peculiar, the perilous, the capricious. Short stories are manifestations, their own literary phenomena. Mostly there is no explanatory narrative ramp or roof, there are no stabilisers giving support over scary subject matter – sex and death, classically – and there are no solvent, tonic or consoling endings. The reader is left to decide what everything might mean, and in this way the form is inordinately respectful. Some might want such a reading experience infrequently, some every day, many never."

flavorwire has links to ten short stories which can be read online, starting with the "pitch-perfect short stories and razor-sharp wit" of my favourite short story writer, Flannery O'Connor. They state, "This is not meant to be a definitive list of the best short stories in the world, but merely a celebration of the form and a collection of ten of our many favorites, limited to those that we could track down online." Nikolai Gogol is another of my favourite short story writers; here is his entry in The Guardian's Brief Survey of the Short Story.

I have posted several of my own short stories on this blog. They can be found at:

• A Disappearance - Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4;
• Interrogation;
• The Black Rain (see also here, here, here and here);
• The Clean-up King - Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6;
• The Curious Glasses; and
• The New Dark Ages - Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

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The Band - The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.

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."

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Bruce Cockburn - Cry Of A Tiny Babe.