But she has now been tracked down by a couple of his aging disciples, intent on extracting information that will be of use to them in constructing a new religion centred on him. It must be 20 years since she escaped from Jerusalem, when the authorities were persecuting anyone with links to her judicially slaughtered son, and she has been doing her best to forget about him ever since. He now describes himself as a “collapsed Catholic”, and in The Testament of Mary he lends his well-modulated voice to an unhappy old lady, a stranger in a strange land who finds solace in offering prayers to the exotic goddess Artemis. He was brought up in Ireland, and attended a Catholic boarding school where, as he has recalled, he indulged in erotic fantasies about the priests and received detailed moral instruction “from men who were child molesters”. Mary’s plight makes a perfect topic for Colm Tóibín. One of the uses of Mary, it seems, is to provide non-believers with access to the turbulent emotional world of Christianity. In the early years of the 20th century, for example, the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who was decidedly unChristian, wrote a gripping sequence of poems ( Das Marienleben) that imagine what the poor child-mother must have been through, and his words were given a powerful musical setting by the thoroughly secular composer Paul Hindemith. The Protestant reformation was in large part a reaction against Papist veneration of Mary and her mum (Annie the Granny as she is sometimes called), but once the question of Jesus and his earthly family had been raised, it was hard to slap it down. The origins of Christianity got mixed up with such all-too-human matters as sex, childbirth and intergenerational strife and when the Church, with notable assistance from Leonardo da Vinci, began to promote Saint Anne as the virgin mother of the virgin mother, it only added to its troubles. Harping on virginity may seem saintly and ethereal, but in practice it is likely to excite unruly thoughts about how it can be lost. The cult of Mary brought a slew of complications in its wake. To this day many Catholics revere the Mother of God (heretically no doubt) as if she were a divinity on much the same footing as the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. When the Church underwent its triumphant makeover in the Renaissance, depictions of the Madonna and Child replaced Crucifixions as the Christian icon of choice.
The Roman Church, perhaps embarrassed at the conspicuous gynocratic deficit of Christianity compared with its pagan rivals, incorporated some of the stories into a major cult of the Blessed Virgin Mary. But anyone who reflects on these fragments is bound to wonder what she made of the events she was caught up in, and the gossip that circulated amongst early Christians soon took on a life of its own. She received scant attention in the New Testament: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were never very impressed by the female sex, and as far as they were concerned Mary was a little girl who, having become pregnant without losing her virginity, gave birth because she had to, and suffered insults from her child, as parents do, before becoming a helpless member of the crowd that watched him being nailed to a cross and left to die. Tóibín’s Mary is based on a well-known historical character – extremely well-known, in fact, though no one knows much about her apart from the fact that she was the mother of Jesus. His latest undertaking is no less adventurous, and equally wonderful: a first-person narrative set 2000 years ago, giving expression to the sorrow and anger of a crotchety old widow called Mary, as she recalls life in her native Palestine from lonely exile in some nameless Mediterranean town. In his brilliant 2004 novel The Master he channelled the 19th-century world of the novelist Henry James, and five years later, in Brooklyn, he became the host and interlocutor of an inexperienced Irish girl who takes a job in America in the 1950s. He prefers to allow his language to be inhabited by the ideas and experiences of others. Tóibín is a literary altruist: his words and rhythms are recognisably his own, but he never draws attention to himself or to his extraordinary intelligence and artistry. His essays, stories and novels are supple and lucid and gorgeously phrased but perhaps the best thing about them is their reticence. Some people regard Colm Tóibín as the greatest living practitioner of English prose, and I think they may be right. The Testament of Mary by Colm Tóibín (Viking)
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