ON THE cover of this handsomely produced novel, we see four sleeping men caught up within what appear to be musical staves. They are, perhaps, the interruptive notes in a larger score that we cannot see.

We encounter the four men in the novel. They are those who, according to St Matthew, were set on duty by the sealed tomb and “became as dead men” at the resurrection. We hear the conversation of three of them, as they discover that they had fallen asleep on the job and now must come up with an explanation of how the tomb is empty. As well as the corpse, one of their number has disappeared, too.

Interspersed with their tense conversation is another one, that of a lecturer preparing a talk on the German Renaissance painter Bernhard Strigel’s depiction of these “tomb guardians”, a fallible quartet, all apparently fast asleep. The book contains colour plates of each of them.

The novel is composed, then, purely of these intermixed voices. The reader has to stay alert to two scenes, one with the characters in the painting, and the other with contemporary people discussing them. By holding them together, we are inevitably thrown into philosophical, theological, and psychological questions about facts, stories, attention and excuse, faith and doubt. We are reminded of how myths are shaped and reshaped in the human imagination, and of how some have transformed the music of the human mind with beguiling consequences that continue to play themselves out.

AlamyA sleeping grave guard with crossbow, in one of the paintings by Bernhard Strigel reproduced in the book

The author of this metafictional exercise in ekphrasis, writing a narrative about the visual, is a widely acclaimed music critic and librettist. I know that many will enjoy this book for its energy and creativity, and for its prompting of the reader into the significant presence and absence in this life of both certainty and the divine.

I wish I could join them, but I never quite managed it. I found that, ironically, it lacked music. To this reader, its prose is sometimes laborious and its ideas are often too predictable to be provocative or satisfying. I may well be in the minority when it comes to the book’s reviewers. I hope sincerely that you will read it and discover that I am wrong.

The Revd Dr Mark Oakley is the Dean of St John’s College, Cambridge, and Canon Theologian of Wakefield Cathedral.

The Tomb Guardians
Paul Griffiths
Henningham Family Press £12.99
(978-1-916218-61-1)
Church Times Bookshop £11.69