Jesus, in this testament, couldn’t even convert his own mother. This little novella doesn’t just reinvent Mary: it also throws out a challenge. Medea was vengeful, and murderous. Tóibín’s Mary is nothing like that. (Others have said she’s more like Medea than Mary, but I think that’s ludicrous. I knew, in their roughness, their way of moving in as though they were making a raid on space, that one of them would select this chair, would make it seem casual and thus all the more difficult to oppose. Maybe the memory of him as I enter my last days will retreat into my heart more profoundly and I will not need any help from any object in the room. It is not much to do, and sometimes I look at it as I pass and that is as much as I can do, maybe it is enough, and maybe there will come a time when I will not need to have such a reminder of him so close by. I do not need to keep food for him, or water, or a place in my bed, or whatever news I could gather that might interest him. I keep the chair in the room because he will not come back. It belongs to memory, it belongs to a man who will not return, whose body is dust but who once held sway in the world. Perhaps in the past the chair was in daily use somewhere, but it came through this door during a time when I needed desperately to remember some years when I knew love. There is one chair in this room in which no one has ever sat. There is a remarkable scene in which Mary gets into a real rage over a chair: ‘I fled before it was over but if you want witnesses then I am one and I can tell you now, when you say he redeemed the world, I will say it was not worth it. I whispered it at first and then I said it louder, and as he moved away from me almost cowered in the corner I whispered it again, slowly, carefully, giving it all my breath, all my life, the little that is left in me. I edged back from them and stood in the corner. I turned towards them then and whatever it was in the expression on my face, the rage against them, the grief, the fear, they both looked up me alarmed and one of them began to move towards me to stop me saying what it was I now wanted to say. ‘By his death, he gave us life,’ the other said. ‘He was the Son of god,’ the man said, ‘and he was sent by his father to redeem the world.’
Her initial response to the idea that her son’s death has ensured eternal life for everyone in the world is disdainful, but her outrage grows until she can’t contain it: It is powerful, confronting, and you don’t need to be a grieving mother yourself to feel that it’s much more truthful than anything you might read about Mary in the gospels. Hassled over a lifetime to contribute to gospels that she knows to be fudging the truth, Mary has remained silent, but as she nears the end of her life, she is ready to give her testimony. Her testimony reveals her scepticism about the miracles her doubts that raising the dead was of any benefit to the wraithlike Lazarus her contempt for the followers who mill around Jesus like besotted fans of celebrity and her firm conviction that the excruciating death of her beloved son was not worth the sacrifice. Catholics and Protestants have been in dispute over the Virgin Birth for centuries, but (to the best of my knowledge) until Tóibín no one has ever characterised Mary as a cantankerous old woman who goes to her grave denying her son’s godhead. Tóibín challenges this reductive view of the woman at the centre of the story. From its inception, the story of Christianity needed Mary to be a meek, virtuous, selfless and heroic symbol as part of its identify, and it still does. For them, it matters intensely that he maintains a regal position his subjects look to him as King as part of their identity. Homer delivers heroic ‘types’, and the reader is not really privy to their innermost thoughts and fears. But Malouf takes us into their hearts and minds – he shows, for instance, how the burdens of kingship weigh heavily on Priam, and how his subjects – especially his surviving children – can’t reconcile the poignancy of his needs as a grieving father with his role as a dignified king. What is most striking about the difference is the way Malouf humanises the characters.
This uncompromising reimagining of the story of Mary the Mother of God reminded me of David Malouf’s reimagining of Homer’s Iliad in his novella Ransom. But Mary Gordon at the NY Times, however, thought it a beautiful and daring work. Kevin from Canada was puzzled by its nomination for the Booker, Joe Pinkser at The Atlantic found it a slog. very religious people, and people not interested in religion at all. But it’s come in for some heavy-duty criticism, and not just from the usual suspects i.e. I was completely riveted by this short novella, and read it in a single sitting.
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