The panel on the Booker Prize Preview Show spoke highly of how well-written, how impressive and, just as importantly for me, how short it was and so I ordered a copy.
I took a break from reading a much longer book late on Sunday afternoon and by early evening had finished it, not only because one could and because it might be best done that way but mainly because it was impossible to put down.
Colm Toibin maintains the spare, hard-eyed, insistent language of Mary with an economy that soon becomes hypnotic. She is sorrowful but undeceived by the events she reports of her son's later life, last days and death. She tells of being watched, being followed and of a political murder.
Her son has gathered some misfit friends and their long discussions, she can tell, are increasingly led by him. But she is aware of sinister intimations surrounding him.
The detached narrative of events become more passionate and desperate as the dangers become more apparent but she is powerless to prevent the inevitable. Escape is not an option until she has witnessed the grim crucifixion and all but his harrowing last moments. His family,
watched helplessly as their brother grew easily towards death in the same way as the source for a river, hidden under the earth, begins flowing and carries water across a plain to the sea.
I can't see why it should be particularly controversial but there again I am not religious, not Catholic and no theologian. Thus, if there is some heresy in an account like this then perhaps it doesn't help that has been done so well. The stories in the gospels are compelling however much, or little, credence one is prepared to give them, written several years after the fact without much verification of detail (and apparently with several other accounts that didn't fit the early Christian church's version omitted) and Colm Toibin's words for Mary here are powerful in very much the same way.
She is hugely dignified, even glorious in her Stabat Mater here, tougher than 'dolorosa' would suggest, as she concludes,
I can tell you now, when you say that he redeemed the world, I will say it was not worth it. It was not worth it.
Is that the world or the redemption that wasn't worth it. I don't think we need to ask.
I don't care whether it won the prize or not. By my very rough calculation, this might be less than 30 000 words long and a novel, I have seen it said, is at least 50 000. So where do categories begin and end. The prize brought it to my greater attention and it was two hours well spent reading it and so prizes, as far as that goes, are a useful thing. The book wouldn't necessarily benefit from being any longer. Toibin gave us it as he saw fit. And giving it a prize wouldn't make it a better book.