Jesus !!!

The Portrait of a Lady emerged from the weight of its own prose and immense detail to be quite a success but not so much that, after four Henry James novels in a row, I wanted to get involved in another long one straight away.

It might be as much about Gilbert, the baddie husband, or the manipulative Madame Merle and the emergent secret they shared. If it was not for Isabel to know, she still might have exercised more judgement in her choice of first husband and so my sympathy for her is limited. Thus, although the happier ending is only strongly hinted at, it looks like it will have one. And like an episode of Midsomer Murders, the answer turns out to be not one of the frontrunners but one who, until the design of the plot is revealed, might only have appeared to be making up the numbers.

So, while Henry James takes fairly high order among novelists, one does not want to live by him alone and a change of scenery, and writing, makes for the latest costume drama.

 

I was nudged back, by something, to one of the recent shortlist of Best Books in the House, which as far as I can tell is the same as Best Book Ever, for me. And I'm as impressed as ever with A.N. Wilson's Jesus, for its scholarship where 'scholarship' means learning applied as best it can be; lucidity and open-mindedness in an area so clouded by faith, belief, tradition and irrationality that one would otherwise struggle to know what to think.

Andrew doesn't assume that Jesus wasn't married just because the gospels don't say he was. They don't say he wasn't, either. He had no idea about setting up a new church. He was a charismatic, firebrand Jewish preacher with radical ideas at a time when the Roman Empire was troubled by sectarian monotheists. It was Paul, as per another book by the same author, that made the Christian church perhaps the most significant and powerful movement of the subsequent two thousand years.

It's a hot, dusty story of both fishermen and bookish types rather than carpenters, of much unlikeliness explained in terms that make it plausible, some mysticism notwithstanding, that depends on the same human frailties that Wilson, and Jesus, have an understanding of. Their world of sectarianism, tyranny and violence was in essence not so different from how it was before or has been since.

Jesus never said he was the son of God, the second part of the Trinity, and rejected all entreaties to be king of a new Israel. It is astonishing how he became sentimentalized into 'gentle Jesus, meek and mild', born in a stable attended by three wise men from the East who came bearing gifts. Embellishment upon embellishment in what was only ever literature has made something ludicrous out of reportage written decades after whatever he said and did were said and done. But he was more real than Robin Hood and Andrew Wilson did a tremendous job in finding what there might be of him in amongst the accumulated rubble of outlandish fiction, all the architecture and music built upon one very successful preacher.

Do I like him, no, I don't. Hot-headed, difficult, troublesome from childhood until his early death, he is the template for all those pop stars that burnt out, for Faust, Icarus and that useless article, Che Guevara, whose revolutionary image adorned so many student bedroom walls in the 1960's and 70's. His legacy lasted longer than Che's did, though, even if it descended into horrors that he never intended and the gaudy ceremonies that he never meant.

But maybe A.N. Wilson, high C of E Tory as I think he would identify, wrote the best book I've ever read as an eventual part of that legacy. And it's remarkable to think that one of my other six favourite books is Ungentle Shakespeare by Katherine Duncan-Jones, to who he was married for some years.

It must have been compelling. One inappropriate syllogism, a non-sequitur or a contemporary usage that couldn't be translated into Latin. That's what life should be like. I wonder who they think will win the World Cup.