Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana, by Anne Rice

This 2008 novel by the author is her second novel about the life of Jesus. It is narrated by Jesus himself, who is now 30 years old. Rice begins this volume by attacking the issue of his sexuality. For some, this may seem to be sacrilegious, but my initial impression is that this is a wise decision for a fictionalized telling of Christ’s life. For he must above all be human if this treatment is to work, and what better way presents itself in today’s society.

The novel begins with Christ waking from, in effect, a wet dream about his cousin Avigail. Then two boys suspected of an impure relationship are stoned to death. So sex is front and center, as it often was in the Bible. And Jesus’ sexual life comes under suspicion by family and friends, for he is 30 and has not married.

Rice then establishes the local political situation, with the Romans exerting more control, sending in more soldiers. She also establishes, in passing, that there is a drought. This creation of the political and geographic climate is one of the strengths of the early chapters.

Jesus is then challenged by his brother James (son of Joseph’s first wife) to end all rumors—to marry, for example, the beautiful Avigail, whom he admires and who likes him. Jesus adeptly dodges the issue, and then more sincerely answers his mother that he does not know all his future, but he does know that he must not marry.

Meanwhile, in the political arena, the young men of Nazareth, under Jason, leave town to go to Caesarea and protest to the governor about a new sacrilege in Jerusalem. This leaves the town defenseless, and brigands sweep in. One attacks Avigail, then drops her while escaping; and Jesus comes to her rescue. Which sets up a new round of sexual tension. In which Rice expands on the unfair treatment of women, how they are “protected,” and suspected, by their men.

Because he has rushed to aid Avigail, Jesus is accused by her father, Shemayah, of taking unfair advantage of her. So her father imprisons her in his home—until she escapes, and in despair confronts Jesus, who again becomes aware of his sexuality. Whereupon her father emerges from a crowd and once more accuses her of indecent conduct with Jesus. Violence is about to occur, when Jesus asks God for rain, and the deluge sends all scampering to their houses. It is a double-edged deus ex machina, for it also ends the drought.

And as this rain calms the crowd, and the mood changes, as the people come to their senses, realizing that nothing untoward has happened, and also as Avigail becomes betrothed, we wonder at the emphasis on the community, on a romance in this community, while there is no treatment of the mission that brought Jesus to this earthly life. Indeed, Jesus himself wonders for a moment what it would have been like if he could have married Avigail—which many had anticipated.

Here we are, more than halfway through this novel, and we are reading a novel of love, of prejudice (against women), of political and environmental hard times. There is a rabbi, but no spiritual concerns except references to the Bible. And there is Jesus, but also no spiritual concerns.

What is Rice trying to achieve here? A portrait of Jesus as a human? But he is too human for me. His concerns are too human. It is as if Rice is trying to fill that empty history of his life with the human quality that we need to perceive in him if we are to truly understand and accept the sacrifice he made for all mankind. Because only a true man can make that sacrifice work; and here, she is saying, is the evidence that he was a man, that he was human.

Whereas, what I want to know is the conflict within Jesus. There must be, if he is human, and he is there to save all humans. Might he not wonder how he will achieve this? Might he not wonder if he is capable of achieving this? Is this not where a novelist should go?

And now there comes a report from John the Baptist. And all the community wants to go forth and encounter him. Are we at last arriving at the spiritual mission of Jesus?

Yes. And, surrounded by the thousands descending to the river to be baptized by John, Jesus has a revelation. He is filled with the memory of the acts of his entire lie, both pleasant and unpleasant. And realizes that this compares to the anguishing experience of everyone being baptized. And as they experience this because God is experiencing it as he forgives them, Jesus wonders how they can endure it. He wants to help them, “to be with each one of them as he or she comes to know.”

As he sees all these anguished memories being entwined, Jesus says to God, “I will be with them, every solitary one of them. I am one of them! And I am your son!” However, the moments leading up to that knowledge, to that revelation that follows Jesus being baptized by John, are very impressionistic. It is partly Jesus being overwhelmed, but even more, one suspects, Rice being not quite sure how to handle this new awareness by Jesus.

And the answer from God is that “you are absolutely alone because you are the only one who can do this.” And so Rice has brought Jesus to the realization that “It was inside me. I’d always known who I really was. I was God.” For the lack of certain knowledge has troubled Jesus since the first volume. And Rice knew she had to bring him to this realization before he begins his public life.

The question is: has she succeeded? Is it convincing that Jesus was not aware of his mission before? And is it convincing how he receives this knowledge? I am, frankly, not sure. First, that he did not know his mission until now. And, second, that the knowledge came to him through an intellectual deduction, and an emotional awareness. Yes, there is a certain human logic here, and Rice’s purpose is to make Jesus human. But a spiritual action, a spiritual infusion, is lacking.

Has Rice attempted the impossible here? To create a human man whose mission in life is completely spiritual. Is being true to the needs of literature allowing her to be also true to the portrait of this spiritual man?

And then, after the meeting with John the Baptist, and Jesus’ new awareness, the novel changes. We have left Rice’s imagination, and enter with Jesus into the incidents of scripture. The Devil tempts him three times. He drives the evil spirits out of Mary Magdalene. He cures the mother-in-law of Simon, and invites Simon to become Peter and join him. Other disciples follow, including Matthew, who has cared for Joseph when he died. But there is no flow to these events, no cause and effect, no inevitability, no developing understanding in Jesus’ mind of their connection.

After gathering his disciples, Jesus says he must attend Avigail’s marriage. So in a sense we understand the earlier emphasis on Avigail. Indeed, Jesus has one last fleeting thought of what might have been with her. Then we are off to Nazareth for the betrothal, and then to the groom’s home in Cana for the wedding feast. However, this extensive ceremony is told by Jesus very matter-of-factly. There is no emotion in his description, except for that one fleeing thought of loss, and then a moment of happiness amid the music and celebration of the wedding feast. Whereupon…guess what happens? Right. Water must be turned into wine. It is the first miracle of Jesus’ public life.

So, has Rice spent the first 75 percent of her novel just to set up that first public miracle? More likely, she has wanted to explore Jesus’ private life as a mature man, just before he entered public life. And then realized how that relationship with Avigail could lead to her ending.

But that portrait of his private life does not succeed for me, because she has not given depth to the man Jesus, has not probed his emotions, has not challenged him to speculate on what his life is leading to. She has created a tangible world, reflecting both considerable research and considerable imagination. But she has enlivened it with an unoriginal plot and then framed it with modern issues of Jesus’ possible sexuality and the treatment of women in that distinct culture.

My understanding has been that Rice cut short her planned treatment of the life of Jesus when, after this book, she became disenchanted with events in the Church, especially at the Vatican under Pope Benedict. That she lost her inspiration. But after reading this novel, I am having second thoughts. That she actually lost her inspiration because she saw how difficult continuing his life was going to be.

I surmise this because of the final quarter of this novel, when it finally turns to the events of scripture. For here is where I sense a lack of originality. No new meaning is given to the events in Jesus’ life. Nor is there any deep emotion. Or any issue of conscience. Much less, any deep fear by Jesus of his life to come. And because she uses Jesus himself as her narrator, this type of probing is required if this is to be a work of literature, rather than simply another religious treatise on Jesus’ life.

So my initial regret that Rice would not continue this series has subsided. Her heart was in the right place when she started, but with this work she seems to reveal her own limitations. And I see no reason for still another book relating the life of Jesus. Yes, she writes from Jesus viewpoint, but the risk of that approach does not pay off. First, she cannot come up with created events that show Jesus in a new light. And, second, when she recreates scenes from scripture, she does not bring us to a new understanding of those scenes. They are embroidered, but they are not given a deeper meaning.

I note that my comments on the first volume, Out of Egypt, were much more positive. That I had looked forward to this volume. Unfortunately, while Rice had the imagination to follow the more reactive life of a young boy surrounded by significant events, she lacks here the imagination to follow the life of a grown man who is more in control of his life. For the mature Jesus, she concentrates on sex and romance, which may be typical for the ordinary man but it should not be for him. Yes, it has to be raised; but then it has to be discarded for more spiritual content. And the reader not diverted to the romantic concerns of other members of his family.

Overall, Rice shows a lack of the spiritual imagination required for a new approach to Jesus. And my assumption that there will be no future volumes leaves me grateful for the first volume, but not disappointed if there should be no more. (April, 2014)

November 1916, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Interim comment. I write these words after reaching page 350 of this 1,000-page novel that was completed in 1984 but not published until 1993, in Russia. And my preliminary conclusion is that Solzehnitsyn is no longer novelist; he is an historian. He is not writing about the personal lives of people. He is writing about people discussing and reacting to historical moments. Yes, the people are well drawn, but they have no emotional lives.

The purpose of this work appears to be to portray the incompetence of the Russian army, the Russian government, and the Czar. To make inevitable the Revolution that is to come. It is as if after his Gulag series Solzhenitsyn is no longer comfortable in creating fiction. For fiction exists for its own sake, creating real characters in a real world, whereas this author has a message to convey to his readers: that the Russians saw the leaderless plight their county was in, took no action, and so brought on the Revolution themselves.

I have now finished this novel, which Solzhenitsyn calls Knot II of The Red Wheel. And my reaction has not changed. This work is an interpretation of history in the form of a novel. In the form of a novel, but not a novel itself. If there is a main fictional character, it is Colonel Vorotynstev, whom we follow in perhaps 25 percent of the book. But of that percent, only about half is concerned with his personal life. In that half, he become disillusioned with his wife Alina and then fascinated by the seductive Olga. It is a routine triangle of a disappointed husband and another woman, which does remind some of Tolstoy.

But this work is no War and Peace, much less an Anna Karenina. Whereas Tolstoy told us a personal story of how his characters lived in and were affected by war, there is no impact of the war—or the budding revolution—on these personal lives. Instead, Vorotynstev spends the other half of his time discussing the inept conduct of the war with his fellow soldiers, with friends, even, in fact, with Olga.

Vorotynstev is portrayed as a sensible and practical colonel, who, aside from his personal intrigue, is concerned about the conduct of the war. He sees the inevitable failure to come, and is concerned about the survival of the Russia he knows. We follow him as he joins a movement to find the right military leadership for the army. And, like some, he concludes that the only answer is for Russia to get out of the war. That that is the only way this incompetent country can survive. And, of course, no one is persuaded to act. Whereas the reader, of course, knows the tragic result of this inaction, the triumph of Lenin and his revolutionaries, and the changing of history.

In the remaining 75 percent of this work, we are basically overhearing political discussions by soldiers based in the capital, St. Petersburg, and (less so) by civilians on the homefront and in Zurich. Of course, Solzhenitsyn is skilled enough to make these conversations believable and effective. In fact, he usually sets them up with well-drawn portraits of the characters and their environment.

But these novelistic skills for me go to waste, because the author is interested only in history, and his version of history, meaning the ineptitude of the Russian government and the political maneuvering of the many characters opposed to the government.

In fact, in his Author’s Note, he tries to cajole the reader into reading what he terms “the historical matter” that he spreads throughout the work—frequently in small print, as if to make its historical excerpts more official. But after my first exposure, I skipped these historical matters. And, indeed, I skipped through much more. For example, the long section on Lenin in Zurich, much of which was earlier published as a complete book. For example, the lengthy section in which we enter the royal palace and then the mind of both the Emperor Nicholas and his wife, the Empress Alexandra. Solzhenitsyn seems particularly intent on using them to portray for us the impact of Rasputin, often called Grigori.

Finally, this work has a completely novelistic ending that is difficult to evaluate. It is highly effective, as we follow a woman, Zina, who has been seduced and abandoned by her married lover Fydor (whom we have met earlier in the company of Vorotynstev). She has lost her mother and her young child, she believes, because she has abandoned them for her lover. She enters a church and confesses her sins, and finds as a result a certain peace. But is the scene’s inconclusivness intended to represent the historic inconclusiveness of the entire novel?

This appears to be the conservative Solzhenitsyn stressing his rightist roots. For he has spent much of this work exposing the selfishness and manipulations of the leftists, along with the government’s ineptitude. This ranges from the plotting of Lenin to the Empress’ foolish belief in Rasputin.

Nothing dramatic occurs in historic terms in this work, unlike Knot I, which revolved around the initial invasion by the Germans. Here, all is political talk and political maneuvering, either by the revolutionaries, the government, or the military hierarchy. Which leaves the reader without any narrative interest, or any emotional interest (except for the two triangular affairs that have no impact on the historic substance of the work).

It appears that Solzhenitsyn is now a moralist at heart. He started out as a true novelist with Cancer Ward, etc. But then he moved to the Gulag series, and he has not been a novelist since. What he has tried to do here is use his novelistic skills to create reader interest in his historical theorizing. But I skipped his historical sections because I was interested in reading a novel, not in reading about history. Of course, one must marvel at the research that went into this work, a work written when Russia was still under the Soviets and, later, when the author was in exile in Vermont.

In the Times, both Bernstein and Bayley praise this book. Both say that Solzhenitsyn has caught the tenor of the World War I times in Russia. However, I notice that Bayley acknowledges my reaction to the work. He says that the author himself “knows that human beings interest him more as social phenomena than as unique and individual creatures.” And at the risk of sounding too much a traditionalist, I would ask, what is the purpose of a novel? Is it to involve the reader with a person (or persons) or is it to involve him in understanding history?

Bayley points out that the (historic) detail of this work reveals that the fate of Russia that we know today was not inevitable, that it resulted from the detailed (in)activity that this work portrays. And he has a point. But I would ask whether this point should apply to a work of history or to a work of fiction. We are obviously in separate camps. Is my camp so old-fashioned? That I want to be the fly on he wall of a bedroom rather than of an imperial palace.

My reaction to both Bernstein and Bayley is that they have reviewed the work that Solzhenitsyn wanted to write. And to me they have rationalized their interpretation of this work. They evaluate the author’s intentions more than his achievement. They compare him to Tolstoy: (Bernstein) “ambitious, panoramic yet intimate, prodigiously researched, invested with a strong sense of verisimilitude.” And compare Vorotynstev to (Bayley) “heroes who will never resolve their problems or escape the confrontations that in the Russian novel constitute the true livingness of life.”

But, as I see it, this “livingness” in fiction should concern one’s personal life, not the historic environment in which the characters live. Much like Solzhenitsyn, who in his personal life is more politically conservative, revealing it here in his critique of the leftist machinations, I find myself conservative in my appreciation of literature. So will I be left behind, like the Russians of 1916 were? Or will I emerge, like the Russia of 1990, as a true interpreter of our literary heritage?

Bernstein writes that, given our knowledge today, the “story has a piquancy that can come only from watching people marching toward a tragedy that they could avoid if only they knew what we know.” On the level of history this is true, but it is not on the level of the human beings we meet. Vorotyntsev’s emotional distraction between two women certainly cannot stand in for the nation’s political divide.

My own rewriting would give 75 percent to that emotional conundrum and 25 percent to the political environment. But I am not Solzhenitsyn, and I have certainly not experienced what he did. I believe, however, that fiction should be ruled by the heart, not by the intellect. He is a great man and a great writer, but here he has traded fiction for history. And the loss is literature’s. And ours. (January 2013)

Parrot & Olivier in America, by Peter Carey

This is quite a feat. This 2009 novel is about a Frenchman (Olivier) who comes to America and falls in love, and about his aide, Parrot, an Englishman who serves his needs in America and also falls in love. It is a very entertaining novel, as well as a very penetrating one, both in its portrait of the two men and in its portrait of America.

While it works completely as a novel, it is also a fictionalization of history. It is the story of Alexis de Tocqueville, and his adventures that produced Democracy in America. I am not a student of history, so I do not know what is true here and what is imagined. But it does not matter. What matters is that Carey has created here real characters in a real world.

The novel begins slowly, as it reveals the early life that brought these two men together. Olivier is an unformed, privileged aristocrat who is sent to America when French revolutionaries threaten his and other noble families. Parrot, who lives a more confused life as a printer’s apprentice, loses his father in a fire and ends up as the servant of the aristocratic Marquis de Tilbott, who takes him under his wing as an apprentice, betrays him in Australia, then brings him to France, where he is assigned to report on the activities of Olivier in America.

But once the two board ship, meet its American passengers, and arrive in New York, their encounter with the new culture, and its contrasts to the old, introduces the novel’s solid substance. For while Olivier has an assignment to investigate prison conditions in America, he soon becomes captivated by the social and cultural differences, a development that he will explore in a classic equivalent to Democracy in America.

However, it is not the culture of America that entices the reader, but the personal stories of each man, and of some of the people they meet. We are particularly drawn to the love lives of the two men. Will they find their true love, will their love be acknowledged, and will they each find happiness? It is not an original theme, but a reliable one serious novelists rely on to draw the reader into the substance of their work.

Here, the substance is the contrasting cultures of America and Europe, the aristocratic leadership of the latter and the democratic leadership of the former. Which is what inspired de Tocqueville, of course. And the novel ends with the consequences of that contrast on the lives of our two heroes.

But I find Carey’s conclusion a little too pat. Perhaps because it lacks drama—and because the ending itself lacks any emotional impact. For while there is a contrast in the fates of the two men, even an intended irony, the result comes more from the head than the heart. And their fates seem somewhat arbitrary: one love affair seems to end for the flimsiest of reasons, at least flimsy for our day; and one man strikes it easy, too easy, as he discovers an unexpected, and convenient, source of income.

This novel is told with just enough of the 19^th century style to convey its historic portrait of two lives and two countries. But Carey paid more heed to the novel’s structure, which is built around the contrasting experiences of Olivier and Parrot. The emphasis is slightly toward the former, but his fate is less satisfying than Parrot’s. Is this because his character is based on a real de Tocqueville, while Parrot is strictly imaginary? Indeed, the imaginary Parrot is there to create for Carey the contrasting viewpoint that de Tocquville’s actual companion did not.

The contrast exists in the two men’s upbringing, their intellectual acumen, their effort to control their own destiny, their reaction to America, their eventual integrity, and the destiny of their love. While they come together with a certain mutual respect at the end, after alternating chapters heighten their differences, the novel’s conclusion fails to reach a sense of completeness regarding Olivier. His classic work is not enough.

So what does it all mean? Carey wanted to present here, I believe, two reactions to the encountering of America by two young Europeans, one an impractical French aristocrat and one a much more practical, underprivileged Englishman. How their understanding of America differs, how their ambitions differ, how their success differs.

Olivier is allowed to reach certain conclusions about America that are both perceptive and half-baked. Of the former, he believes that the country’s leaders will come from all walks of life and some will be “barbarians at the head of armies, ignorant of geography and science.” He also wrongly holds that a society of equals will never produce great art, that only an aristocracy has the leisure needed to appreciate and create it.

These conclusions are reached after a series of entertaining encounters by each man with the people of America. The most interesting one comes from Olivier’s encounter with the family of Amelia Godefroy, whom he loves. Her father is a wealthy, perceptive man who introduces Olivier to much of America, both fascinating him and disillusioning him.

The book is best summed up by the Reading Group Guide: “Both Parrot and Olivier are profoundly affected by the democratic leveling of class distinctions they find in America. Olivier is alternately repulsed and fascinated, disdainful and admiring of the new democracy, while Parrot, after drifting aimlessly, finally finds the freedom he’s been denied all his life. By showing us their reactions to the fledging democracy, Carey gives readers a visceral sense of just how thrilling and baffling a place America could be for new arrivals from Europe — and how unsettling of old-world social conventions.”

Carey is always entertaining, and I look forward to reading other works by him. He has a unique way of interpreting past reality. It becomes a starting point for his own imagination. And his embellishments, his unique interpretation, convert the result into literary art. (December, 2013)