ISN’T it just like it? You wait years for a prize-winning contemporary novelist to tackle the life of Mary, Mother of Jesus, and then two come along within two months of each other, and from the same publishing house no less.
The Testament Of Mary
Colm Tóibín
Penguin Viking, £12.99
Naomi Alderman’s The Liars’ Gospel opened with an account of the life of “Yehoshuah” by Miryam. Well acquainted with Roman barbarism, the arrival of a young man, Gidon, who may have been a radicalised follower of her martyred son, brings back memories of his diffident difference, and savage execution, to her. Alderman shaped a convincing narrative that wore its historical learning and political nous lightly. Now we have Colm Tóibín’s version, The Testament Of Mary. It is a plangent and pained novella (not much more than 100 pages long), a chiaroscuro study of grieving that still manages to be a book about the Mother of Jesus and not just any mourning mother.
Alderman’s Miryam is Jewish in both religious practice and culture; Tóibín begins his version with something from the Christian tradition. It opens with Mary being “looked after” by two men, two men who question her continually and about whom she comments “there is something hungry and rough in them, a brutality boiling in their blood”.
Although shot through with sinister undertones more akin to the later work of Harold Pinter, we gradually infer that they are John, “the disciple whom Jesus loved” and who was both with Mary at the Crucifixion and instructed by Jesus to look after her, and possibly Luke, whose Gospel the early Church Fathers considered to be based on interviews with Mary (on the basis of, for example, the Nativity phrase that Mary “kept these things and treasured them in her heart”: Luke was also supposed to have painted the first icons of the Virgin, such as The Black Madonna of Czestochowa).
But this is not an orthodox account of the life of Mary. Very early we learn that she has slipped out when her protectors are not there and been to prayer in the Temple – not the synagogue, but the Temple to Artemis. Indeed, the context of narration is Mary whispering the full and true version of her life to a hidden silver statue of the goddess in return for granting her a moment’s respite from overwhelming despair. It becomes clear that though she is fundamentally stricken by the death of her son, this darkness predates his execution.
Speaking of the peace she felt on the Sabbath, Mary says “what was strange then was that in those few hours before sundown a sort of quiet battle went on within me between the after-sound of the prayers, the peace of the day, the dull noiseless ease of things, and something dark and disturbed, the sense that each week which passed was time lost that could not be recovered and a sense of something else I could not name that had lurked between the words of the book as though waiting like hunters, or trappers, or a hand that was ready to wield the scythe at harvest time”.
Tóibín follows the broad gospel narrative, with one major scene taking place at the Wedding at Cana, where Jesus famously rejected his mother. There is a claustrophobia throughout – there are spies, informers, and collaborators; and the young men surrounding her son are misfits (“you put two of you together you will get not only foolishness and the usual cruelty but you will also get a desperate need for something else”).
It’s difficult not to read into the text Tóibín’s Irish background: the suffocating state and the festering idealists share a common psychology. While Alderman occluded any reference to miracles, Tóibín sketches them in ambiguous detail.
The description of the raising of Lazarus is chilling; “it was as though the earth beneath him was pushing him and then letting him be still in his great forgetfulness and nudging him again like some strange new creature jerking and wriggling towards life”. The final reveal – which it would be remiss to describe too attentively – concerns what really happened after the Crucifixion. It is both poignant and ingenious and leaves room for honest doubt and faltering faith.
The style throughout is lapidary. There is a chill like marble on the diction, and Tóibín deliberately extends the sentences longer than one might expect. It gives an air of terrible tiredness (a literary technique which Beckett previously deployed to similar effect). A clutch of images repeat and recombine – Jesus speaking with his mother is “easier, gentler, like a vessel from whom stale water had been poured out”; Lazarus, appearing at the Cana wedding, is “as though his spirit was still filled with the thunderous novelty of its own great death, like a pitcher of sweet water filled to the brim, heavy with itself”.
There is a profound ache throughout this little character study, a steely determination coupled with an unbearable loss. Although it has some insightful things to say about religion and the period – the descriptions of the Crucifixion are visceral – it has a universal message about the nature of loss. “I can tell you now, when you say he redeemed the world, I will say that it was not worth it. It was not worth it.” «