I WAS glad that Colm Tóibín did not win the Man Booker Prize
last week. His Testament of Mary is a bold retelling of
the life of Christ through the eyes of Mary. But, for all its
imaginative power, it is, in the end, an arid and reductive
attempt.
As I read it, I wondered whether the author had been to the
small stone building hidden in a pine forest, up the mountains
overlooking Ephesus - which is where the mother of Jesus reputedly
retreated at the end of her life. In its soft coniferous silence,
it is one of the most serene places I have ever visited. But, if he
went, the Irish novelist clearly failed to be touched by this.
His book begins from interesting questions. Why does Mary speak
so little in the New Testament? Why do the Synoptic Gospels not
place her, stabat mater, at the foot of the cross, as John
the Evangelist does? In answer, Tóibín takes the docile
dolorosa of Christian tradition, and turns her into a real
woman, consumed by a grief, both tender and furious at the cruel
death of her son.
In her Ephesus retreat, his Mary is impatient with the two
disciples who minister to her needs, and, at the same time, try to
draw from her suitable details to add to what will become John's
Gospel. The problem is that her memories are of a son full of
contradictions, which do not fit the disciples' desire to "make
connections, weave a pattern, a meaning into things".
Tóibín has a powerful creative imagination, which is lyrical and
yet bleak. His psychological insight offers telling details, such
as the way Jesus claps his second arm to his chest, after the first
has been nailed to the cross. His Mary is uneasy at the hysteria
that surrounds her son's miracles. Tóibín has no evidence for this,
but then a novelist does not require evidence - only a convincing
poetic ingenuity.
Yet much of his invention does not convince. He plays
interestingly with the idea that Lazarus, having passed through the
doors of death, does not welcome his return to the pain of life.
But there is something grotesquely comic about his zombie
resuscitation.
Tóibín offers no scenes to support Mary's contention that
Christ's disciples are a bunch of misfits - "fools, twitchers,
malcontents, stammerers" - the kind of men "who could not look a
woman in the eye". And he moves the wedding at Cana to the end of
Christ's ministry and inverts its meaning, to no obvious
purpose.
Most perversely, he has Mary run away from the foot of the cross
before her son's death, in fear for her own life. This is a
traducing of the courage of a woman who was forced to cradle in
death the body of the child she had held so tenderly at his birth.
He portrays the depth of Mary's subsequent guilt with great
intensity, but reduces her to not much more than inconsolable
grief.
His motivation is hard to fathom. He told the New York
Times that he wrote the book, and an earlier stage version,
out of anger at Roman Catholicism, as the paedophile-priest scandal
reached its height in Ireland. But there is something almost
adolescent about his gleeful judgement that he was "playing with
fire" in the work, which prompted rosary-chanting protesters
outside its Broadway theatre, with signs condemning it as
blasphemy. "It hasn't been controversial," he told Reuters last
week. "It isn't as though it's been burned anywhere." He sounded
almost disappointed.
Had Mary really been as Colm Tóibín portrays her, it is hard to
think that, 2000 years later, anyone would still be talking about
her.