The surprising thing about Burgess’s Man of Nazareth is how tamely it reads. Blandly respectful of its source material, written in some of the least-adventurous prose of Burgess's career, this may be the Greyest Story Ever Told.
Having worked on the screenplay for Franco Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth (the one with sapphire-eyed Robert Powell in the title role) thrifty Burgess worked-up his material into a novel. It tells the story of Christ’s life from Nativity to Crucifixion, as reported by a Jew called ‘Azor the son of Sadoc’ (so that’s ‘Azor Barsadoc’, another AB authorly Burgess persona) who writes for a living—'I write stories and translate them’—and also keeps accounts for ‘Akathartos, a large and untrustworthy wine merchant’ [3]. Aκάθαρτoς means ‘unclean’, an unlikely name for a Greek of any stripe, let alone somebody who makes a living selling comestibles. But let's not get distracted. Having introduced himself on the first page we learn literally nothing more about Azor. He barely intrudes. Instead we get a leisurely exercise in linear third-person storytelling, swapping between the perspective of Christ’s immediate family and followers on the one hand, and the authorities (Herod the Great, then Herod Antipas) on the other. It’s a diatessaronically-worked narrative in which all the famous phrases from the New Testament get quoted, usually in flaccidly expanded and indeed repetitive form. For example:
'I say this to you, then: don't be anxious for your life, what you shall eat, what you shall drink—nor for your body, what you shall put on. For surely life is more than food and the body more than raiment. Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow. They toil not neither do they spin, but I say this to you—that not even Solomon in all his glory was arrayed like one of these. Now if God so clothes the grass of the field, which lives today and tomorrow is thrown on the fire, how much more is likely to concern himself with your needs? Don’t be anxious, then about food and drink—for your father in heaven knows you have need of these things. Seek first his kingdom and his justice, and all these things will be added unto you. Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will take care of its itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.' [174-75]There's lots of this. When he's not quoting direct from the King James Version, it cannot be said that Burgess improves by adapting: 'the Lord is my shepherd,' Jesus says. 'I shall not lack anything, he leads me to fine grazing fields and feeds me beside comfortable waters' [81]. Comfortable waters? Who talks of water like that?
So, the story works its slow way along its familiar grooves. The book's oddest feature is its complete lack of Burgessian stylistic flourish or formal experiment. Presumably he decided to tell this story as plainly as possible in the belief that its inherent grandeur and grace would thereby shine more powerfully through; but the effect is somewhat the reverse, a kind of timidity of the writerly imagination.
I suspect this is because simplicity of approach isn't really Burgess's métier. Long stretches of Man of Nazareth are simply dull. Sometimes there are sentences of a badness rare in this usually most scrupulous author. For example, in the scene where Christ, fasting for forty days and nights in the wilderness, is tempted by Satan with visions of fine food, we get this sentence, possibly the worst Burgess ever wrote:
Jesus yearned towards the dissolving ghost of custard. [138]This is how Burgess makes the thirteen-year-old Jesus speak:
'Fathers, fathers, the plurality. We all have one father, source of life. The men we call fathers are his instruments. Whence comes the potency of the seed? Not from men. There is only one creator' [88]... which is to say, like no thirteen-year-old ever spoke in the history of humankind. Presumably the intention here is to indicate the divinity within the teenager, but not only doesn't it work, Burgess himself doesn't believe it and immediately tries to row it back: 'you speak strangely,' Jesus's interlocutor notes, and Jesus replies 'I fear I do.'
The many little anachronisms in the novel have the feel of inadvertence. That Burgess sometimes attempts to defuse the profoundly un-Aramaic nature of describing a delicious wine as 'nectar', or talking of Christ's 'charisma', by adding a quick 'what the Greeks call' only makes more jarring the moments when he doesn't do that: Christ healing 'hysterical blindness and palsy' [138]; Pharisees eating a feast of trout, a cold-water fish not found in Palestinian waters [256]; Christ noting the passing days, 'so many he could not compute them' [133] and so on. This is nit-picking, of course; and larger anachronisms (such as Christ's repeated lectures on the necessity of free will, theologically rather more medieval Catholic than first-century Jewish) can be contained within the parameters of using the story of Christ as the launch-pad for broader religious meditation. But the problem with the novel is that it doesn't launch far enough, doesn't have the courage of its own convictions. It cleaves too cautiously to the agreed dimensions of the gospel narrative.
Oddest of all, the book doesn't realise it's doing this. It believes it is being outrageous and shocking, offering a radical reimagination of the man. Zeffirelli's Jesus of Nazareth had already produced one tie-in novelisation (1977, by popular American theological author William Barclay and illustrated with photos from the TV serial) that comprises a gently orthodox, unstartling retelling. Burgess clearly felt he had more latitude. Man of Nazareth, though, isn't nearly latitudinous enough.
Burgess's main departure from the gospels is that young Jesus takes a wife. The marriage at Cana is presented as his marriage, to a tall girl called Sara. She has a couple of miscarriages, bickers domestically with the Virgin Mary and gets trampled to death in a riot at Jerusalem, all before Christ's ministry gets going. He doesn't marry again, but perhaps Burgess thought that the portrait of Christ as man doing the husbandly thing between the sheets ('we may suppose he savoured the bodily joys as much as any of us' is how the narrator, rather stiffly, puts it [101]) would drive true believers to paroxysms of pious outrage. The fuss that Scorcese's Last Temptation of Christ film caused in 1988 with its one, rather murkily shot sex-scene (and that a sort of hallucination that Jesus experiences on the cross rather than an actual part of his narrated life) might incline us to agree with him. But this hermetically sealed episode from a young Christ's life is a neither-one-thing-nor-the-other misfire. Burgess's account of the crucifixion tries to pick up the shock-factor after hundreds of blameless, dull pages with Azor's reinterpretation of the Roman spear-in-the-side:
I have to interpret in the light of probability the strange legend of the transfixing of his side with a spear and the issuing from his side of blood and water. I feel this is an obscure and timid as it were lateral mode of describing the spearlike erection of the phallus of the newly expired, and that the two fluids are a riddle of a third. He was not only the Son of God but the Son of Man as he said so often himself. [326]None of this, though, raises the temperature of the novel. It is both too intermittent and too prudent in its marginal addition to degrade the dignity of the central portrayal. And that's the crucial matter: the same year this novel was published Monty Python's Life of Brian was released and caused an enormous kerfuffle. This was because some believers saw satirical comedy as a fundamentally demeaning way of representing the messiah. Burgess's marginal speculations aside, there is nothing demeaning about the way Christ is written in Man of Nazareth. Some of his early miracles are explained away by Burgess: he picked up some medical skill in Egypt and so could address some cases of lameness and blindness; the water at the Cana marriage wasn't really turned into wine, instead Christ played a kind of emperor's-new-clothes trick on the gathered guests by telling them, as he served them unchanged water, that truly holy people would be able to taste the wine where the sinful would taste nothing but water. We may even begin to wonder if Burgess is going to go the full Unitarian mile and thoroughly humanise his god-human. But, no. Lazarus really is brought back from the dead; Christ himself really does die on the cross and then comes back to life. It dawns on us: what the book is doing is disposing of miracles that strike Burgess as too much like prestidigitation, retaining only those miracles that comport with the grand and dignified figure he is writing.
The Christ that emerges from this book is wise, calm, never out of control: decorous rather than revolutionary. If I had to sum it up, I'd say: Burgess's Christ wholly lacks perversity. The shocked reactions of the respectable people amongst whom he moves have to be told, since they cannot be shown. The squib, it is damp, it is damp even unto the moistness thereof.
It's tempting to blame the religious subject matter. In books such as Nothing Like the Sun, ABBA ABBA and (especially) the great Napoleon Symphony Burgess proved himself a genuinely interesting and innovative historical novelist. But where Moses, Christ or the Apostles come into it he loses his focus, falls back upon a trundling, linear aesthetic unobjectionableness and writes bad books. Ah well.
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