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Found a copy of Anne Rice’s Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt (2006) in the local bookstore. I’ve been curious how the author, popular for her novels of vampires and witches, would tackle the subject of Christ. Would she portray Christ the human being or would she depict him as the Son of God?
The blurb on the back cover says this much:
With the Holy Land in turmoil, seven-year-old Jesus and his family leave Egypt for the dangerous road home to Jerusalem. As they travel, the boy tries to unlock the secret of his birth and comprehend his terrifying power to work miracles. Anne Rice’s dazzling, kaleidoscopic novel, based on the gospels and the most respected New Testament scholarship, summons up the voice, the presence, and the words of Jesus, allowing him to tell his own story as he struggles to grasp the holy purpose of his life.
So it’s going to be Jesus narrating his own story. Hmmm, interesting. Reminds me of The Vampire Lestat. But how would the voice of this boy Jesus sound like? And so I turned to the first page. And what do you know, right at the novel’s beginning, I read about how Jesus kills a boy. A few pages later, of course, he brings this boy back to life.
But with this incident, which we later on learn from her “Author’s Note” that she got from the Apocrypha, Rice proceeds with the premise of a child Jesus not fully aware of his supernatural powers. It is this secret or this mystery — that his family keeps from him, presumably to protect him until he is ready to face his destiny — that becomes Jesus’ quest.
So even as the family journeys from the safety of exile in Egypt to the turmoil in Jerusalem, Jesus embarks on a venture to seek the truth of his birth. The journey as rendered in the book tends to be plodding, with descriptions of the Jewish life taking up most of the book’s 317 pages. But then the story is told from the point of view of a seven-year-old Jesus, just out of exile, who finds Nazareth a foreign and strange land.
But then, the Jesus we meet in the novel seems to be a pensive boy. He seems too passive, too contemplative for a boy that age. It does not help, too, that the language Rice chooses for Jesus to tell us what’s happening reveals a consciousness that is, according to Melvin Jules Bukiet’s review in the Washington Post:
repetitive as well as uninformative. Meeting cousin Elizabeth for the first time, Jesus notes, “I thought her face pleasing in a way I couldn’t put into words to myself.” Then he describes himself as having “the mind of a child who had grown up sleeping in a room with men and women in that same room and in other rooms open to it, and sleeping in the open courtyard with the men and women in the heat of summer, and living always close with them, and hearing and seeing many things,” none of which he shares with us.
Bukiet also says of the linguistic style employed in the book:
Worse still, clumsy and outright ungrammatical prose infects every page. For instance, we’re told, “Joseph and Mary were cousins themselves of each other, that meant happiness for both of them.” Presumably aiming for the resounding echoes of biblical syntax, Rice is merely redundant, so much so that the 300-plus pages of this book feel infinitely longer. Here’s a sample of dialogue. Mary says, “Think of all the signs. . . . Think of the night when the men from the East came.” Then Joseph says, “Do you think anybody there has forgotten that? Do you think they’ve forgotten anything. . . . They’ll remember the star. . . . They’ll remember the men from the East,” to which Mary replies, “Don’t say it, please. . . . Please don’t say those words.”
What kept me going, however, was curiousity about how Rice would make Jesus confront his destiny. I was not disappointed in that crucial scene with the old priest inside the Temple of Jerusalem. That makes me want to read the more mature Jesus in Rice’s sequel, Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana.
