This brief book is a strange and uncomfortable tale of Christ's crucifixion from the point of view of his mother, who is not the peaceful, accepting figure of iconography. This Mary finds her son and his friends strange, self-important, and grand-standing. She is angry at herself and others for letting this happen to her son. She has run away to protect herself and is alternately ashamed and careful to keep her identity secret.
The novella is told in the first person by Mary, her internal monologue as she must patiently accept the visits of two men who want a story she refuses to describe as they desire (we are to assume they are apostles), as she retells the years of his preaching, wishing she could stop him, had stopped him, but could not, both out of weakness and because his followers had become adamant. A mother's anger at the influence her child's friends seem to have, encouraging him towards an end that all can tell will be a confrontation with law and order, is authentic and, if her voice were not so full of spite the reader might be able to feel sympathy, but instead we can only approach as close as to feel her horror and resentment at the world.
Her retelling of the raising of Lazarus is just one example of how Toibin retells the story to consider how on earth, the family might have dealt with the return of the dead, how the village might have reacted. In the Bible, the story is a miracle of Christ, but in life...what would it have been? Toibin reminds us that miracles are not simply glorious but also deeply upsetting re-orderings of the laws of nature, of reason, of what we believe we know to be real. For the family and friends of Lazarus, life is never the same. For those who just happened to be with Christ that day, and will never see Lazarus again, of course, it is a testament to the power of their leader. But, they do not consider the cost...
As many have turned to Mary, throughout history, for a sense of peace, for her grace, so did she need something similar, something ancient to embrace her. She leaves the Jewish faith of men and fathers to seek the feminine, a goddess from another culture. She will die not in the faith of her son, whose followers cleverly encompassed her tale in theirs, but seeking what many seek in her.
A quick read, the story is however unsettling. Its brevity was a clever
tactic on Toibin's part to keep his reader from quitting before the end. This is not a beach read, as it were, but is a part of the tradition of myth and fairy-tale retellings. I am sure many will be horrified that Mary is depicted beyond the blue virgin, but many may find it comforting to recognize that she too might have felt the strong, complicated emotions of life.
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