He Ain’t Heavy

Just imagine the familiar nativity scene of Mary and Joseph in the innkeeper’s stable, with the animals keeping patient watch as Mary gives birth not to one child to be wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in a manger, the forthcoming savior of humanity, but to twins, one strong and healthy, one weak and retiring, whose destinies clash and collide but ultimately unite in dark ways to create the story we know so well. This is the audacious move that Philip Pullman makes in his rewrite of the gospel story, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, and he pulls it off brilliantly. If I were a gambling woman, I’d place bets on this book finding its way almost instantaneously onto the list of modern classics, it’s that good.

So Jesus of Nazareth has a twin, whom his mother calls Christ, and the boys grow up together displaying very different characteristics. Jesus is a normal, lively, naughty boy, always getting into scrapes, whilst his brother is quiet and learned and devoted, following around after Jesus and managing to clear up the messes he makes by miraculous means. As the boys grow, however, Jesus starts to come into his own, his passionate, engaged nature making him into an electrifying teacher. Wherever he goes, trouble and excitement follow. Christ stays back in the shadows, watching the effect he has on people and listening to his uncompromising message of humility and extreme goodness. Jesus demands that the people look to their deeds before all else, reviles wealth and importance, insists that the lowliest, least superficially deserving of beggars is more readily accepted by God than those who trumpet achievement and virtue. When Jesus heads out to the wilderness to see whether he can hear the words of God, Christ follows him and attempts to persuade him to temper his performance with the use of miracles and wonders. What if there were an organization of men like Jesus, who could establish a Kingdom of the faithful? Who would set up ethical laws and see they were enforced, who could convert others to the cause, who would make sure no one ever went hungry and unloved again? How much more powerful it would be than one man, how much more good they could do. But Jesus angrily refuses to even consider such a thing. There is only one way, and that way is solitary and passionate.

And so Pullman cleverly sets up a divide between the religious spirit and the organized Church, and to begin with it looks as if Jesus with his stubborn principles is in the right, and Christ, with his manipulative PR is in the wrong. Christ is visited by an angel, who tempts him with the idea that he should be as famous and important as Jesus. The angel encourages Christ to be a chronicler, to write down all that happens to Jesus, so that his teachings should not be lost to future generations. But there is a catch here, as what matters is the coherence of the story, the power with which it is told. ‘There is a time and there is what is beyond time,’ the angel says to Christ. ‘In writing of things as they should have been, you are letting truth into history. You are the word of God.’ And so Christ doctors his testimony, adding details here and there to make the story better, to draw out and emphasise the message it contains. Already the opposition of Jesus as good and Christ as bad is troubled – the story is not exactly what happened, stories always shape reality up, tidy it up, in order to reach a truth that could not be seen without such editing. So how are we to judge stories, when the crimes they commit are precisely what results in their value? Indeed, how are we to judge a story that questions the ethics of storytelling? As the narrative progresses, Christ will be drawn into committing terrible deeds for the sake of the story, but because we know what that story is, and how powerful its effects, we cannot easily judge his actions.

In the meantime, Jesus, with his insistence on the literal and the real, sinks ever deeper into an existential stance, one that approaches life as a perpetual call to heroism in the face of its injustices. He ends up inevitably questioning the very existence of God as it is something he cannot see or touch. Jesus loves the world, and has nothing but profound admiration for every part of creation, but he comes to the conclusion that it is a world vacated by God, who has abandoned his children for unknown reasons. What is intriguing about this portrayal is that Jesus doubts, but his angry, questing righteousness leaves no room for sorrow and suffering, or for being humbled by love. It is Christ who will really suffer, who will understand the torture of not being good enough, of making mistakes and being forced into awful situations against his will. Christ will be the sinner whose genuine regret makes him forgivable, whilst these humane positions are never ones that Jesus, in his undeviating trajectory towards holiness, will ever inhabit. Jesus and Christ together make the one man who reaches down through history towards us, Jesus embodying the ethical principle in a way that often seems untouched by genuine, complex emotion, Christ embodying the contemplative, overarching meaning, in a way that is undermined by human weakness and by ends justifying means. The life of the spirit is one of endless paradox, in which there is no good intention without unwelcome consequence, no vision without arrogance, no humility without error, no truth without lies.

I’ve barely scratched the surface of this book, it is so rich. It doesn’t matter if you have no interest in religion whatsoever; at basis, it’s a story about right and wrong, about the uses and abuses of power, and about the things we do in the name of love. It’s a book that provokes you into thinking and the conclusion is as moving and extraordinary as you might expect. I was completely blown away by it, as you can probably tell! And in awe again at what stories can do when they are placed in the hands of incredible writers

Reneging on the Devil

We are in Naples in 1926 and the great Italian tenor, Rocco Campobello is recovering from an illness that nearly killed him. In fact, there was one moment, in the depths of his emergency operation, in which he did momentarily cross over to the other side, and in this moment he experienced a revelation that was also a brokering of a spiritual deal. He would survive, and when his life was restored to him, he would settle his account on earth, he would ‘put his house in order’. The story of The Maestro’s Voice by Roland Vernon is about the afterlife of ambition, about what happens when the delusions of fame and fortune are revealed as insubstantial and damaging to the genuine joy of living. But this is far from being a philosophical novel. It’s much more of a thriller, as Rocco Campobello must fight for his right not to sing, when so many people are determined that he should make a magnificent comeback.

Rocco Campobello has become a legend. Mostly this is due to his marvelous voice and his talent for dramatization, but he’s also been in the right place at the right time, able to take advantage of the earliest recording techniques to become a household name. He has changed the sound of opera and become a prototype to be followed for decades to come. But such success has inevitably been costly in other ways. In a series of flashbacks, the narrative shows us the route Campobello has taken from his early days in the backstreets of Naples when he and his friend, Gabriele Tomassini, dreamed of being taken into the one good choir in their area. Both are fine singers, but it’s Rocco who is ambitious and who will do anything to leave behind poverty and the blacksmith’s job for which he is destined. Gradually we learn about the early betrayals that Rocco commits in order to further his career, and which haunt him now. And we gain a picture of a man who has sacrificed everything that is gentle, loving and ordinary to the cultivation of his precious and extraordinary Voice until it has become a monster of demands, adored and fêted by the public, cosseted and spoiled by Rocco himself, an entity in its own right that is repeatedly represented as the symbol and the site of a Faustian pact.

In fact, Faustian pacts abound in this narrative, as Rocco has made any number of them to gain his monumental career. Now that he is aware he was doing business with the devil, how can he break the agreement in a way that saves him and spares those he loves? His biggest difficulty lies with his allegiance to the mob, and to the elderly but still powerful Don Graziani, who controls every element of his life. But Graziani has his own problems, notably the rise of Fascism, with its a new breed of men determined to wrest control of Italy away from the old networks, and a son, Bruno, who has recently come running back from New York, where he has left a trail of heinous crimes behind him. Bruno lacks his father’s subtleties and his good sense and has only inherited his taste for violent means of manipulation. He has seized on the idea of Rocco’s comeback as a vehicle for his own ambitions in theatre management, and of course there is a great deal of money at stake. Rocco’s resistance to the whole idea of resuming his career is an obstacle he refuses to acknowledge.

So it’s Rocco versus the mafia, with the secondary characters of the narrative lining up their loyalties on either side of the divide. The Grazianis have two doctors on their pocket, who are ready to falsify the medical reports and lie to Rocco about the state of his health. But Rocco has some devoted members of his household, notably his secretary Pietro Boldoni and his accompanist, Wallace Pickering, although these are men with secrets to hide. Then there’s Rocco’s disenchanted wife, Molly, who is only interested in making sure her life of luxury continues. And finally, Rocco traces the son of his old friend Gabriele Tomassini, who turns out to be a highly promising opera singer himself. The plot twists and turns as each character fights for nothing less than their survival.

Reading this book was exactly like watching one of those lavish drama productions that the BBC occasionally puts on. There isn’t much psychological depth, but this is more than compensated by the vividness of the landscape in which the story takes place. The writing is lush and sensuous and highly evocative. The characters are richly created, despite being essentially goodies and baddies, and the plot brings them cleverly into conflict. Naples in the early years of the twentieth century is brought beautifully to life, its slums, its underground passages, its glamorous villas and its scintillating scrum of rich and poor. Vernon writes about opera with authority that clearly comes from experience and passion. Altogether it’s a bouillabaisse of a book, a thick Mediterranean stew in which all kinds of disparate ingredients come together in satisfying harmony. I do have a few quibbles: sometimes the sheer weight of exposition kills the pace of the book (although the descriptions are uniformly good), the initially intriguing character of Molly becomes a bit incoherent, her development somewhat sidelined in the plot, and a very promising inquiry into the links between religion and celebrity is only ever hinted at when I would have liked to have seen it pursued. But these are minor concerns and didn’t detract from my overall enjoyment of the narrative. This is a good intelligent holiday book, one to swallow you up in the experience of a different world and to dazzle you with some vibrant prose.