So much time has passed that I don't know how I should be reviving this blog. I have a little difficulty recalling the books I've read, especially the ones I didn't care all that much for to begin with. So I guess I'll just take them on bird by bird....
Ever since Torie introduced him to me, I've been working my way through Jim Crace's novels, and this past spring I read the best one yet, Quarantine (1999). I was a little leery of it at first, because all the descriptions I'd read talked about its being about Jesus's forty days in the wilderness. In fact, the novel is not really about Jesus's forty days in the wilderness; those other reviews suffer from the inability to conceive of a novel featuring Jesus as a character as being about anything besides him. The novel begins with an informally assembled community of people trapped in or voluntarily quarantining themselves in the wilderness, including a mean, boastful, deceitful merchant on his deathbed, his long-suffering soon-to-be-widow, an infertile woman praying to conceive, some other people I don't remember, and a preening, aimless youth who happens to be from Galilee. We see what happens to the community as a whole when faced with the rigors of forty days' fasting, especially when the merchant suddenly wakes up from his death throes and takes over the camp. Among other things, the Galilean dies. The writing is smooth, spare, and rhythmic. You can tell that something interesting is happening, but you don't quite know what it is. And then, once you realize what Crace is doing, it becomes extremely exciting indeed, and you race to the finish to see how he'll pull it off.
SPOILER: I once had a conversation in which two conflicting models of Christianity emerged: one, that Jesus Christ is a historically verifiable person who performed at least some version of the events in the Gospels, and that the existence of such a person was necessary to the formation of religious belief in his divinity; the other (my belief), that there is no evidence of the existence of such a person, so proof/evidence/historical documentation can be entirely irrelevant to the formation of stories about his acts or religious belief in his divinity. What one gradually realizes is that Crace is using the form of the novel to demonstrate how the second model could come about: that a cult might form around the figure of a person who never did anything interesting at all, who in fact died before he could even complete a vision quest. Crace suggests that all it takes to start a new religion is a noisy, lying, boastful man--a storyteller--and somebody to believe the story.
I don't know how a Christian would read this novel. I found it delightful and smart and very, very satisfying. Especially after The Da Vinci Code. One of the things that I dislike about the Da Vinci Code revival is its insistence on there being a true, repressed history of Christ as feminist, radical, liberatory, and so forth, because this so-called alternative reading still maintains the centrality of Christ and Christianity. I don't believe in a radicalized good-guy Jesus because I don't believe in Jesus. It was very exciting to me to read a book that appears, at first, to be about Jesus, but radically decenters both Christianity and the documentary religious view that seeks to provide proof for its beliefs. It also strengthened my approval of Crace, which was shaken by the intermittent afterlife stuff in Being Dead.
