I have a book review in the November issue of The New Oxford Review of Niall Williams’s novel, John (Bloomsbury USA, 288 pgs., $24.95). I’d link to it but I’m a computer challenged Luddite.
UPDATE: here it is [scroll down].
I bring this book to your attention because it is one of the most intriguing, well written, and satisfying books I’ve read in a long time.
Williams’s objective is to set aside school theology and its associated doctrinal baggage in an attempt to capture an understanding of the experiential reality of Jesus Christ.
The story is set on the famed Isle of Patmos where John and his followers have been exiled by the Roman Emperor Nerva. John is an old man; blind, frail, crippled up with rheumatism, and hasn’t written since the "revelations." His disciples grow anxious, waiting on the coming of the Lord, and while most remain faithful, Gnostic disorders arise. One of the more intriguing aspects of the work is the author’s descriptions of John’s reminiscences of his life with the Christ which offer the reader a fresh perspective on the Gospels that is both fascinating and revealing.
The novel is a detailed and erudite examination of the existential consciousness, the psyche, of John the Apostle, the beloved of the Lord, as he prepares to write his gospel. A gospel that will triumph not as poetry or art but as the " . . . symbolization of a divine movement that went through the person of Jesus into society and history."
The author succeeds at explicating the stark reality of the age, the tensional existence of the apostle, and the final installment of the praeparatio evangelica in "the mystery of the divine presence in existence."
I don’t know for sure, but maybe Freddie might be intrigued?
