Hogwash. Even The Guardian’s reviewer knows what Tóibín is doing:

[Mary] tells the reader her story: the ambivalence, bordering on dislike, she feels for her son’s followers, whom she describes as misfits, “fools, twitchers, malcontents, stammerers”; the estrangement she feels when he sheds his boyhood identity and becomes someone else, “his voice all false, and his tone all stilted”. That estrangement reaches its height when, at the wedding feast in Cana, Jesus appears not to recognise his mother; he has become, she realises without rancour or self-pity, filled with “unthinking energy”. Leaving the wedding, she almost turns back, but does not.

Tóibín recounts a handful of these familiar stories, on each occasion making them subtly disturbing.

and…

“the pain was his and not mine”, she says, unburdening herself of a final moment of weakness that her visitors would rather not hear. “The truth should be spoken at least once in the world.”

That truth, as Tóibín imagines it in this fearsomely strange, deeply thoughtful book, is far more subversive than it might at first seem. It runs counter to much Marian doctrine and many of the beliefs of the Roman Catholic church, not least the power of Mary to intercede on our behalf. The Mary who sits in her darkened house in Ephesus would not, I think, willingly take on the prayers of the world; all that she wishes for, she tells us at the book’s close, is to confine dreams to the night-time and living to the daytime, and to live “in full recognition of the difference between the two”.

bobster,

Well, I am part way through Les Misérables, and Monseigneur Bienvenu, the Bishop of Digne, has recently died. I don’t know whether I am a sap, but he seems to me the most saintly character I have run across in all of literature. He immediately comes to mind when I think of what a Christian should be like. It is a very difficult standard to live up to, but perhaps some Christians might attempt to come close.

What I saw in Mark Shea’s column was the same, “Oh how they hate us! Oh how we suffer at their hands!” There is, of course, the obligatory mention that Tóibín is gay (another implied “Oh how they hate us!”). Apparently good Christians can get as ugly as they want in defending the Blessed Mother, and can make accusations of how full of hate everyone is toward the poor persecuted Christians, and yet if you look to them for an example of how to behave when people have different ideas from you, you see what looks very much like hate coming from them!

I have only read the very opening of Tóibín’s book, and yet I doubt very much that when I go further I am going to find anything as hateful as Mark Shea describes. Tóibín is a deeply thoughtful writer, and I don’t imagine for a minute that he turns out crude anti-Christian propaganda so that the media will applaud him. It’s a very respectable #814 on Amazon, but this is not going to be Tóibín’s The Da Vinci Code that will make him a millionaire. It’s a literary novel, not a stunt.

When your attitude is, “Oh how they hate us! Oh how the media is against us!” you really don’t have to take anybody else (least of all critics and others who disagree with you) seriously.

David Mills says The Testament of Mary derives most of its effect from being an attack on Mary and through her upon Jesus. I don’t for a minute think that Colm Tóibín set out to write an attack on Mary and Jesus, and that is not how I am going to approach the novel. If Tóibín has lost his Catholic faith and his belief in the Christ of Catholicism, it doesn’t exactly make sense to say he has written an attack on Jesus and Mary. He wouldn’t believe in the Jesus and Mary that David Mills does. To call it an attack (and I wonder if David Mills perhaps unconsciously thought along these lines) seems to me to assume that Tóibín deep in his heart knows that what David Mills believes about Jesus and Mary is actually true, and he is maliciously trying to paint an ugly and false picture. I will have to read the novel to find out for myself, but I will be surprised if I really wind up believing that the novel is an attack and an act of hate.

Noone should be called a gifted writer when they dip their pens in sewage.

If Christ was a man like us in all things but sin, then I wouldn’t want to be the person that insults his Mother, for as all males know, many personal insults can be traded or forgiven, but the ones that start with “your mother” are causus belli.

It is, of course, it is a strength, not a weakness, of Christians that they don’t become incited to violence by perceived insults. The Mary I imagine from my 12 years of Catholic education is not one who would look kindly on crudity and blustering in her defense.