Saturday, November 30, 2013

On Colm Tóibín's The Testament of Mary


[Have taken a break from book-reviewing for various reasons, but here's one I did for the Hindu Literary Review]

In contemporary fiction, the retelling of old stories – myths, folklore and religious texts among them – has become almost a genre unto itself. There have been countless revisionist versions of the Mahabharata or Ramayana in India, including “perspective” narratives that filter events through the eyes of a particular character. Done well, this gives us new lenses through which to see familiar stories we had taken for granted, or grown weary of; in the process, we may also understand something about how legends come into being and then become buttressed and sanctified through repetition over the centuries.

In his slim new book, the Irish writer Colm Tóibín, whose 2004 novel The Master was a fictionalised treatment of a key period in Henry James’s life, turns to a more distant story that is both shrouded in mist and set in stone. The Testament of Mary is an account of certain episodes in Jesus Christ’s life, as told in the confused, plaintive voice of his mother Mary, long after the crucifixion. That the old woman we encounter in these pages will be a de-mythologised version of the Holy Virgin is obvious almost from the opening paragraph: Mary speaks of men who visit her repeatedly, trying to gather anecdotes and recollections ("I like it that they feed me and pay for my clothes and protect me"), and we can tell that these are apostles engaged in the process of myth-making, collecting material for their books. But the narrative she tells, finally, is not to them – it is to us, and throughout Tóibín keeps us aware that this is as much a story as the “official” ones handed down over thousands of years.

Unlike another recent retelling, Philip Pullman’s The Good Man Jesus and theScoundrel Christ – told by an omniscient narrator and in the gentle, dialogue-driven cadences of a tale read out to young readers – The Testament of Mary is an intense first-person narrative that comes to resemble interior monologue. The prose has the stillness that marks Tóibín’s best work – the effect is a little like watching incoming waves on a sea-shore, knowing that the soft murmurs might soon turn into something louder, more strident – and naturally, given the subject matter, it is run through with melancholia, the need to remember set against the pain of remembering.

The voice we get here is the one of a mother befuddled by all this talk of her boy being the “Son of God”; a woman who doesn’t care about the big picture, who wishes only that time could be turned back to the days when she and her child and husband were happy together, untouched by the burden of divinity. But it is also the wise, knowing gaze of someone fearful of the things that happen when groups of men – social misfits, who cannot look a woman in the eye, who need a form of validation, and are driven by those twin qualities, “foolishness and cruelty” – gather together. Do such herds inevitably beget cults of violence, or lead to the formation of a new religion, or both? It is a question that hangs over this book, without being explicitly stated.

Being treated as the mother of the Messiah is frightening for Mary, especially as she senses that attempts are being made to co-opt her into the creation of legends. Recalling the famous incident at the Cana wedding, she insists she had nothing to do with the water-into-wine “miracle” (in her telling, Jesus’s remark “Woman, what have I to do with thee?” was made in another context), but that his followers focused their attention on her as if willing her to be part of the episode. Hence the mundane and unglamorous view of big events such as the sermons (“...my son would insist on silence and begin to address them as though they were a crowd, his voice all false and his tone all stilted, and I could not bear to hear him, it was like something grinding...”) or the rise of Lazarus, presented here in ambiguous terms. Hence her recollection of watching her son’s final, painful journey to the hill, his attempts to remove the crown of thorns from his head, and of her own guilt of leaving him on the cross to bear the last moments of his Passion alone. Her searing admission that despite everything she witnessed and felt, ultimately “the pain was his and not mine”, is a poignant counterpoint to the conceit of one man dying for the sins of a race.

The is a quiet book on the face of it, but there is tumult beneath its surface – not the obvious violence of nails being driven into a man’s hands but the violence of pattern-seeking narratives imposing themselves on and bullying “ordinary” lives, so that the world of dreams is the only remaining place where some grace may be found. “I want to be able to imagine that what happened to him will not come, it will see us and decide – not now, not them,” Mary says, “And we will be left in peace to grow old.”

5 comments:

  1. But it is also the wise, knowing gaze of someone fearful of the things that happen when groups of men – social misfits, who cannot look a woman in the eye, who need a form of validation, and are driven by those twin qualities, “foolishness and cruelty” – gather together. Do such herds inevitably beget cults of violence, or lead to the formation of a new religion, or both?

    Very perceptive line. The world we live in along with all its trappings, be it our ideas of morality or the religions we have made up is the handiwork of men - insecure creatures always seeking and making up systems and strictures to gain control over one's own inherent barbarism. In sharp contrast to women who are inherently the more naturally civilized sex with less of a need for strictures to regulate their lives.

    Camille Paglia has some very insightful things to say about this. Here's a take on her views from an excellent blogpost -

    In Paglia’s mind, males are the sexual exiles, drifting aimlessly and looking for fulfillment. The male sex is always seeking and never contented, and as Paglia notes, “There is nothing in that anguished motion for women to envy.” The woman is the superior sex, and as Freud observed, “Man fears that his strength will be taken from him by woman, dreads becoming infected with her feminity and then proving himself a weakling.” Man is at eternal battle against effeminacy on a daily basis, and it is this struggle that creates Mozart but also Jack the Ripper. Paglia declares that it is through culture that men become whole and it is the efforts of mens own aggressive nature that creates the commerce that generates the wealth that underpins Civilization

    That line about Mozart and Jack the Ripper hits the nail on the head. There's something in the male nature that produces such extreme outliers. Whereas women as a sex are less likely to produce a figure as brilliant as Mozart or someone as evil and stupid as Jack the Ripper.

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  2. not the obvious violence of nails being driven into a man’s hands but the violence of pattern-seeking narratives imposing themselves on and bullying “ordinary” lives, so that the world of dreams is the only remaining place where some grace may be found

    I'd say that the urge to seek patterns is one of the fundamental drivers of civilization. Cultures without this urge, be it the ones in Sub-Saharan Africa, America and Australia (pre-European conquest) have clearly lagged behind the materially superior cultures of Europe and Asia which have always exhibited a strong judgmental pattern seeking urge.

    But I also understand your view that there's something cruel about this pattern seeking behavior that can mar ordinary lives. That's why we have these milder, less masculine movements in every religion that serve as a counterpoint to the masculine cruelty of the mainstream culture. Eg: The relatively effeminate and egalitarian Bhakti movement making the often cruel Brahminical Hinduism palatable to the masses. Similarly we have Sufism exercising a benign influence on Islam and old Greco-Roman pagan influences making the Christian religion agreeable to large sections of our diverse world.

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  3. Moving and insightful review. You have made me think anew on Colm Toibin's work, and now I want to read this one but also to return to the beginning and re-read some of his earlier works (Blackwater Lightship, Brooklyn) in the light of some of your observations about our constant myth-making. Your last paragraph is extremely moving. Yes, there's "the need to remember" and yes, "the pain of remembering," but there's something else, too, that seeking for grace in re-telling the ordinary, unsung parts of our human lives. You gesture toward that beautifully, without sentimentality.

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  4. You got me interested enough in the premise of the book.
    I hope she speaks of the constant, unreal, public pressure to be 'pure and virgin'.

    I wish someone would write a book on Yashodha. I wonder how she felt never having Krishn back in Vrindavan.

    And oh yes, I once read that the reason men philander and create violence is from a deep survival instinct; the dread of becoming non-existent and redundant.

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  5. Thank god. I was just telling my brother that I missed your writing on literature :)

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