![colm toibin the testament of mary epub rar colm toibin the testament of mary epub rar](https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-100/0111-1/{3CE146F2-7663-4DA3-949F-66B4EA46A7A4}Img100.jpg)
For most of the book I felt I was reading notes towards a novel, something that would be fleshed out once a bit more research could be done, and a few crucial decisions made: is Mary’s son a charlatan followed by desperate misfits, and if so how does that fit with his bringing a corpse back to life? why are the Romans and ‘the Elders’ intent on killing him and all his followers, and in that context why does the head Roman try to save him? why have Mary flee the scene of the crucifixion before the actual death – might there be a less crude way of saying that the Gospel of John isn’t historically accurate? Other familiar scenes – the crucifixion, the miracle at Cana – are recast in ways that in effect claim that the Gospel is lying. There are passages that are pretty well straight retellings of incidents from the Gospel of John: the raising of Lazarus and the ecce homo. The Testament of Mary has different fish to fry – my trouble is I can’t tell what those fish are. The Book of Rachael wasn’t completely satisfying as a novel, but it painted a convincing picture of what it may have been like to be poor or outcast or female in Jesus’ times, and entered convincingly into a world view where tales of miracles could be true without being true as we understand the word. This year veteran novelist Colm Tóibín speaks in the voice of Jesus’ mother. Last Christmas I read The Book of Rachael, Leslie Cannold’s debut novel about an imagined sister of Jesus. Colm Tóibín, The Testament of Mary (Picador 2012)