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. At the wedding at Cana, she sees Lazarus for herself and finds that "he was in possession of a knowledge that seemed to me to have unnerved him he had tasted something or seen or heard something which had filled him with the purest pain." This beautiful novella turns on who or what Mary should believe about her son's life and death and on a mother's grief: "I saw that once again he was trying to remove the thorns that were cutting into his forehead and the back of his head and, failing to do anything to help himself, he lifted his head for a moment and his eyes caught mine.The Testament of Mary by Colm Tóibín (Viking) the sense that there was something missing in each one of them." But when she recounts the story of Lazarus's return from the grave, she presents no other explanation than that of his sisters, that Jesus was the one who brought him back. Mary doesn't think her son is the son of God in fact, she's convinced that he's simply running with the wrong crowd, "Something about the earnestness of those young men repelled me. T ib n (Brooklyn) has chosen Jesus' mother as the narrator of his poignant reimagining of the last days of Christ. Tóibín’s tour de force of imagination and language is a portrait so vivid and convincing that our image of Mary will be forever transformed.
This woman whom we know from centuries of paintings and scripture as the docile, loving, silent, long-suffering, obedient, worshipful mother of Christ becomes a tragic heroine with the relentless eloquence of Electra or Medea or Antigone. Mary judges herself ruthlessly (she did not stay at the foot of the cross until her son died-she fled, to save herself), and her judgment of others is equally harsh. She does not agree that her son is the Son of God nor that his death was “worth it” nor that the “group of misfits he gathered around him, men who could not look a woman in the eye,” were holy disciples. She has no interest in collaborating with the authors of the Gospel, who are her keepers. In the ancient town of Ephesus, Mary lives alone, years after her son’s crucifixion. “Tóibín is at his lyrical best in this beautiful and daring work” ( The New York Times Book Review) that portrays Mary as a solitary older woman still seeking to understand the events that become the narrative of the New Testament and the foundation of Christianity-shortlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Prize.
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