He has seen something dreadful in the afterlife: “If he had come back to life, it was merely to say a last farewell to it.” He stumbles with his sisters to the celebration of the marriage of Cana.
After he is disinterred, following four days of being buried, he is detached, unable to eat, unwilling to speak and clearly dying. Perhaps the most striking part of the book is about the raising of Lazarus. It is always grand in its sobriety occasionally it becomes lyrical: “In the same way Lazarus had a glow of death about him, almost like a garb that covered every aspect of his being and that no one could penetrate, so too with my son there was a sense of the fluster of life, the bright sky on a windy day, or the trees when they were filled with ripe, unharvested fruit, a sense of an unthinking energy, like bounty.” But such flights are all the more remarkable because normally Tóibín keeps a tight rein on those impulses. The text is written in a neutral, timeless English with no contractions on the one hand and no archaicisms on the other. How a man beside the Cross was quite independently feeding live rabbits to a rapacious caged eagle. How his words could not be heard because of the general uproar. How the nails were driven into one hand and he tried to save the other hand by holding it to his side. The Crucifixion itself is described in gory, convincing detail worthy of Mel Gibson. She was not there for the resurrection she dreamed she and Mary Magdalene were seated beside an artesian well. There was no pieta to her eternal regret she fled before her son was dead in order to save her own skin. She realises that these “businessmen” have worked out a careful version of the Gospels, but she is trying to record the truth.
‘Oh, everyone in the world.’ ” Her son’s disciples are divided among the crazies and the homeless who are ready to follow any leader and those who are her guardians, grim professionals of the new order, men for whom there is “no grief, no sorrow, no fuss, something cold, as though life is a business to be managed, that our time on earth requires planning and regulation and careful foresight.” They sound a bit like young communist zealots before the war. ‘Everyone in the world will know eternal life.’ ‘Oh, eternal life!’ I replied. ‘Who has been saved?’ ‘Those who came before him and those who live now and those who are not yet born’ ‘Saved from death?’ I asked. ?’ ‘His suffering was necessary,’ he interrupted, ‘it was how mankind would be saved.’ ‘Saved?’ I asked and raised my voice. His father sent him into the world that he might suffer on the cross.’ ‘His father?’ I asked. ‘His death has freed mankind from darkness and from sin. “ ‘He died to redeem the world,’ the other man said. “It was when they came to the last part that I stood up from the chair and moved away from them. The Virgin Mary, who is not a Christian, is trying to set the record straight about her son as she recalls things many years later in Ephesus, where she was “translated” not by a miracle but by a boat.
It is as tragic as a Spanish pieta, but it is completely heretical.
Tóibín's tour de force of imagination and language is a portrait so vivid and convincing that our image of Mary will be forever transformed.FICTION:THIS IS A SHORT BOOK, but it is as dense as a diamond. This woman whom we know from centuries of paintings and scripture as the docile, loving, silent, long-suffering, obedient, worshipful mother of Christ becomes a tragic heroine with the relentless eloquence of Electra or Medea or Antigone. Mary judges herself ruthlessly (she did not stay at the foot of the Cross until her son died - she fled, to save herself), and her judgment of others is equally harsh. She does not agree that her son is the Son of God nor that his death was "worth it" nor that the "group of misfits he gathered around him, men who could not look a woman in the eye," were holy disciples. They are her keepers, providing her with food and shelter and visiting her regularly. She has no interest in collaborating with the authors of the Gospel. In the ancient town of Ephesus, Mary lives alone, years after her son's crucifixion. Provocative, haunting and indelible, Colm Tóibín's portrait of Mary presents her as a solitary older woman still seeking to understand the events that become the narrative of the New Testament and the foundation of Christianity.