Fifty years ago half the country would have had a coronary at any attempt at a realistic, iconoclastic portrayal. I suppose it’s a measure of how times have changed that there aren’t charges of blasphemy and calls for the book to be banned.
Perhaps things would have been better served by providing her with a foil, or an interrogator of some kind? Tóibín is backing a losing horse from the first word as his narrative is unavoidably one-sided, and captures Mary’s voice and judgement at the end of her life, when sunk in hopeless despair and grief. However, his short stories are well-plotted, and the characters’ interaction provides the spark and color readers crave, so this story would have been jarringly out of place. It’s a disappointment after Tóibín’s masterful short-story collection Mothers and Sons, into which this novella would have fit thematically.
#THE TESTAMENT OF MARY COLM TOIBCN FULL#
While this revisionist portrayal of Mary as an angry, grieving mother, full of believable despair and rage at the cruel fate of her son, and anger at the inadequacy of his followers and their craven attempt to recast his life into something it was not through their gospels, is a welcome and overdue antidote to centuries of empty religious iconography, it’s an inconsistent portrait. The Testament of Mary promises much, but delivers less than hoped. He creates a reversed Pièta: he holds the mother in his arms.Colm Tóibín’s novel The Testament of Mary has not only been transformed into a Broadway play, but it’s been short-listed for the 2013 Booker Prize as well. He is less concerned with portraying Mary as some kind of realistic character, I think, than with depicting the harrowing losses and evasions that can go on between mothers and sons. Tóibín does not so much subvert this image as enrich it. Mary's stoicism in grief and suffering is the stuff of priestly advice to women down the centuries. He gives us a dark picture a mother abandoning her son, fleeing to safety, not waiting to see him taken from the cross, washed and buried, getting out while she can: "I did not cry out or run to rescue him because it would have made no difference." insults and jokes being hurled, and fires lit to cook food."ĭon't we know this story? Has it not been depicted repeatedly in paintings, sermons, poems, music? Are we not familiar with the lovely and tender gestures of the holy women bending over the torn body of their Lord? Tóibín's novel suddenly acts as a 16th-century Protestant, hacking and destroying graven images. Tóibín echoes Auden Mary says: "there were other things going on - horses being shoed and fed. The near-symbolism of this antique-style language is shockingly disrupted when the human body in agony bursts into the text. Modern terms such as "consciousness" or "hysterical" jar but do not break the trance. Nouns stay simple, acting less as signs of reality than as almost abstract markers: "fruit" "bread" "trees" "cloak" "shoes".
The flow of the narrative is emphasised by the repeated use of "and". Mary's oral testimony becomes as grave and stately as a psalm, resonant with the familiar rhythms of the scriptures. Her admission that she cannot read or write reminded me of the 14th-century mystic Margery Kempe, forced to dictate her God-sent revelations to a priestly scribe. We realise that she is recounting her story of the death of Jesus to "guardians" who seem more like jailers.
The novel opens with Mary apparently talking to herself.