This isn’t your mother’s Mother Mary. Forget the Annunciation or the Virgin Birth. The only Assumption here is that Mary is a troubled woman, haunted by Golgotha, hunted by assassins, waiting for death.
Colm Toibin has stepped into the lives of historical figures before with spectacular success. The Irish writer’s most celebrated novel, “The Master,” recreated Henry James in a wry imitation of James’s own style. But that was a literary transformation of studied subtlety. Now that Toibin has moved on to a Master even more revered, he’s tearing out rooms and replacing the furniture. Anyone familiar with the Gospels will find this novella a foreign, unsettling place.
(Scribner) - “The Testament of Mary” by Colm Toibin
“The Testament of Mary” was originally presented as a monologue, first performed last year in Dublin, and the story still shows the imprint of that form: It’s dramatic and poetic rather than analytical and expansive. And it’s not so much a testament of faith as a confession of guilt. There is no Pieta in these pages, except as a mournful dream. Spooked by the guards, this Mary abandoned her suffering son on the cross and took off to save her own skin. Latter-day efforts by Paul & Co. to transfigure his death into something divinely necessary strike her as obscene.
The scene opens on Mary near the end of life. She’s in a sparse room in the city of Ephesus, speaking to us quietly but urgently. “I do not seek relief,” Mary says, “merely solitude and some grim satisfaction which comes from the certainty that I will not say anything that is not true.”
Her insistence on the truth becomes the book’s central concern and flavors this moving drama with an acrid polemic taste. The Gospel writers caring for Mary (or keeping her locked up) have “outstayed their welcome” while interrogating her about what happened to her son. “Words matter,” she whispers to us, but she knows these pious scribes aren’t after the facts. One of her minders, she complains, “is ready to scowl impatiently when the story I tell him does not stretch to whatever limits he has ordained.” She’s determined to articulate the real history, “or else everything that happened will become a sweet story that will grow poisonous as bright berries that hang low on trees.”
If you’d enjoy a tale predicated on the idea that Christian faith is a toxic collection of “foolish anecdotes” based on a “fierce catastrophe,” Merry Christmas!
There was a time when a book like this wouldn’t have had a holy ghost of a chance of getting published. But “The Testament of Mary” hasn’t sparked outrage or boycotts — a reassuring testament to the West’s tolerance for such artistic license and Toibin’s prominence. Some of us are a lot calmer nowadays about creative re-imaginings of sacred figures. Nearly 25 years ago, protesters picketed movie theatres showing Martin Scorsese’s “The Last Temptation of Christ.” But Philip Pullman’s taunting little novel “The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ” barely rippled the waters in 2010. Evangelicals in this country may finally have caught on to the fact that fiery condemnation plays right into the marketing plans of books that would otherwise ascend into oblivion. How “The Testament of Mary” performs is difficult to predict. It’s been widely praised in England, but Toibin is a larger presence there, and churchgoing isn’t.
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