She is regularly visited by shadowy men who want to know everything she knows-and also to make sure that what she knows aligns with their message. She is a widow, and her only son is dead, how recently we are not exactly sure. When we meet Mary, she is old, and she speaks in the sparse sentences that signify that elderly mix of cryptic wisdom and post-verbal senility. But I was intrigued by it, from the first sentence. I was never lost in it-not Ozick-lost, or Chabon-lost. So I did not enjoy The Testament of Mary I felt I was a spectator to this book. I donвЂ™t want a Mary this contemporary and human-just as I do not want a Jesus who hikes up his shorts. So there is an incongruence between the embittered but fully realized personality TГіibГn gives Mary and the famous plot he marches her through it is as if the spinster post-war Irish landlord from TГіibГnвЂ™s last novel, Brooklyn, has time-traveled to the scene of the crucifixion. They are mythical types, who compel us mainly because they animate parables that are extraordinary and moving (and because, in the King James translation anyway, the prose is so good).

New Testament figures do not really have interior lives. And Mary? In this telling, she dies inside when her son dies, so that we might live.Д«ut there is a crucial difference between imagining Henry and imagining Mary. James was watchful rather than alive, refusing to live so that his novels might. TГіibГn sees Mary and James as somewhat similar souls, shy, rather weak figures, endlessly deferential, misanthropes, their own lives absent of joy but ultimately the cause of joy in others. But for TГіibГn, that is an argument for, not against, reimagining her. Of Mary, JesusвЂ™s mother, no biography is possible, and she is a fairly minor figure in the New Testament.

Upon completing The Master, I felt as if I knew James, and, given TГіibГnвЂ™s meticulousness, I probably do know a reasonably accurate version of him. I was defeated by these books, but TГіibГnвЂ™s imagined scenes gave me a vivid picture of the life of James: the repression, the extraordinary (and selfish) work ethic, the unspoken guilt over avoiding Civil War service, the frustrated night spooning with Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. For The Master, TГіibГn drew on many of the great nonfiction accounts of James and his family, such as those by Leon Edel and R.W.B. TГіibГn has played this game before, subtly adjusting our perceptions of historical figures through fiction, most prominently with The Master, a fictional account of the life of Henry James, written in an entirely successful pastiche of JamesвЂ™s writerly voice. Even someone familiar with the New Testament may have trouble, a week after closing the cover of The Testament of Mary, remembering which versions of JesusвЂ™s story come from the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John and which from Mary-or, rather, Colm. But the book is seductive enough, its interior world totalizing enough, that it achieves a kind of instant canonicity.

TГіibГn never makes that argument explicitly, and his book works just fine without it: it can be read as a psychological close-up a noir-ish slither through the forbidding desert world of first-century Judea, stopping to wallow in some famous episodes from JesusвЂ™s life and an argument for how a charismatic mortal could have been transformed, with his own assent and cooperation, into a god. So while The Testament of Mary is a first-person novella, the life of Jesus as told by his mother, it is also an argument about the contingent nature of the Christian tradition. And yes, the narrative voice in The Testament of Mary is very twenty-first-century, more reminiscent of restrained, elliptical, modernism than of the capital-B Bible-but that Bible voice was just a product of the translators assembled by King James in the early seventeenth century, the TГіibГns of their time. This testament comes twenty centuries later, and is obviously a fictional product, but so what? The other testaments were fictions of their time. Colm TГіibГnвЂ™s implicit premise in this short new book is that the earlier versions of the life of Jesus were incredible, too-or semi-credible, reliant on rumor, hearsay, and the authorsвЂ™ wishful thinking. If such a claim sounds incredible, that is the point. The Testament of Mary is not a riff on the New Testament gospels, nor an updating of them: it is a gospel, to be fit snugly up against the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke.

The testament of mary book review