A few weeks ago, when I was browsing through the shelves at the Dudley Library, looking and hoping I’d find one or two titles by Dambudzo Marechera, I came across The Gospel According to the Son.
The title was like a magnet.
Many years earlier, while browsing through the shelves of a bookstore in Harare, Zimbabwe I’d stumbled upon Kahlil Gibran’s Jesus, the Son of Man and I’d been completely taken in by the idea of a novel about Jesus Christ. I’d found Gibran’s book so engaging that it’s now top on the list of books I keep reading and re-reading. Norman Mailer’s Gospel According to the Son is also joining that list.
The two books are similar to each other. They are both based on the Gospels. They both take a familiar story and they re-imagine and re-tell it. They both present an imaginative account of the life and work of Jesus Christ and explore the effect that Jesus had on the lives, hearts and minds of the people he lived and worked among. The story in both books is presented in the first person by a person who was close to the action. And, to me, the spirit that informs and pervades both books feels so authentic that each of the books reads like an alternative Gospel.
The main difference between the two books is that Jesus, the Son of Man was first published in 1928 while The Gospel According to the Son came out in 1998. Also, while The Gospel According to the Son has one narrator, Jesus, the Son of Man is told from multiple perspectives. It is told from the individual point of view of a variety of characters who’d known, lived with, met or heard about Jesus Christ. Most of the characters whose voices we hear in this book are also mentioned or implied in the Gospels. These characters include Anna, the mother of Mary; Mary Magdalen; Caiaphas, the High Priest; Joseph of Arimathaea and Simon, the Cyrene. Jesus, the Son of Man gives these and other characters more time and space than they were given in the Gospels and allows each of them to tell what they saw, heard, thought and felt about Jesus in their own words.
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