The Testament of Mary by Colm Tóibín (review)
- The Testament of Mary by Colm Tóibín
Jesus was one of at least seven children (see Matthew 13:55–56). An Edna O’Brien could do something with a detail like that, but not Colm Tóibín. His Mary grouses through her eighty-one-page monologue like a jaded London crone terminally pissed off by the “fools, twitchers, malcontents, stammerers, all of them hysterical,” that her beautiful only boy (maudlin memories of bathing him when he was little) attracted once he went religious on her. She recoiled from these “men who could not look at women,” though they now provide for her in her old age. More than them, she loathed and still loathes only the howling, bloodthirsty Jerusalem Jews. The Romans finally did the dirty, and she lingers in memory over the details, but the Jews put them up to it. Never a Christian, no longer a Jew, she turns at last to Artemis. Can you believe it? Me neither, any of it.
Jack Miles’s book GOD received the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1996. He is also the author of Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God and general editor of the Norton Anthology of World Religions (forthcoming). A former MacArthur Fellow, he is Distinguished Professor of English and Religious Studies emeritus at the University of California, Irvine, and a senior fellow with the Pacific Council on International Relations.
