HERE'S a little literary parlour game. What connects Michel Faber, Anne Rice, Gore Vidal and Jeffrey Archer? Believe it or not, they've all tried their hand at a new Bible: Archer's The Gospel According To Judas, Vidal's Live From Golgotha, Rice'
s Christ The Lord novels, and now Michel Faber's The Fire Gospel. Part of Canongate's Myths series, Faber's novella is a vexatious, acerbic parable about faith and faithfulness. But the central myth it examines is not the story of the Passion. Nor is it the story, mentioned in passing, of Prometheus, the Titan who gave fire to mankind. The Fire Gospel is the Myth of the Author.
Theo Griepenkerl is a research fellow from Toronto who specialises in Aramaic. On a trip to Iraq to ascertain if there are archeological treasures that can be put into safe-keeping by his department, an explosion shatters the museum. Glass shards scar Theo on the face (it's a motif that runs throughout Faber's work, from the disfigured Issy in Under The Skin, to Sugar's "tiger stripes" in The Crimson Petal And The White). He's a recognisably Faber-esque figure, even if the prose seems more functional, less exhilarating than in previous books. As you'd expect in a work so self-consciously iconoclastic, the images have been shorn away.
The explosion also shatters a Roman-era sculpture, which is found to contain papyrus scrolls. Since the museum curator has also been obliterated, Theo simply steals the scrolls: expedient in plot terms, but unfortunately also accurate in terms of the looting of Iraq.
From the opening pages, Faber has been at pains to sketch Theo's self-centredness and moral laxity. These traits bloom into rampant egomania when he realises what the scrolls contain. It is nothing less than an eye-witness account of the Crucifixion, written as an Epistle from Malchus, a former scribe to the high priest Caiaphas, to an emerging church. Although Malchus is ill, quibblesome, self-pitying and a "bore", he is also a convert with a unique perspective that rewrites the early history of Christianity. He is also allowed some moments of real poetry that counterpoint neatly with the supercilious frame and deliberately gauche style of his writing.
But Theo has other things on his mind than startling new evidence about the historicity of Jesus. He's grousing about his advance, obsessively checking his Amazon Sales Ranking, worrying about his TV appearance, fixating on reviewers, sleeping with his publisher, and getting tetchy about his publicity tour. Some of this material is very funny – there's a particularly fine scene in New York, where his reading is "the biggest crowd the staff had seen since JK Rowling" and the various booksellers' trade sales figures with geeky relish.
Some readers, Theo discovers, have a more proactive form of literary criticism. Outraged Christians (and Muslims, and Mormons) are in high dudgeon. The revelations of Malchus are blamed for suicides. A gun is pulled on Theo in Baltimore. A pair of slightly farcical and unconvincing terrorists – one Islamic, one Christian – kidnap him, hoping to force a retraction or admission that he simply invented Malchus. The ironically named Theo gets everything he wishes for as an author – money, sex, celebrity – and the one thing he didn't count on – readers.
Although there is much to admire in The Fire Gospel, as a whole it doesn't quite ignite. Faber makes some of the Malchus material appropriately shocking (such as Jesus's last words actually being "please finish me"). The level of hysteria around the book seems a little overdone – theologians have wrestled with the lack of any mention of the resurrection in Josephus, or the meaning of the Alexamenos Graffito, or the Dead Sea Scrolls for decades, and come up with surprisingly inventive explanations without a pandemic of atheism shaking the world.
If Faber had chosen to make Theo a fraudulent memoirist, an evangelical atheist à la Dawkins, or even the author of a popular series of conservative stories about wizards, then the hype would be comprehensible. Likewise, if he'd really gone into the mental acrobatics of Christian apologists, the weirdness of Gospel narratives or the challenges of literalism, this jeu d'esprit might have been equal to his merits as a writer.
As it is, the elements of satire and provocation, superficiality and profundity pull in oddly differing directions. One minute the text is similar to Mel Gibson's The Passion, all gruesome precision of torture; then it's more akin to Life Of Brian, with Jesus loosing control of his bladder over the new disciple's face. As for Theo, who has sought popular recognition over peer-reviewed respect – by the end, his vanity is so overweening that even a comeuppance can't redeem him. v
