Review of ‘The Fire Gospel’, author Michel Faber (Canongate, 2008)
(791 words)

In war-torn Baghdad, naïve, irascible and decidedly fusty Canadian museum curator, Theo Griepenkerl stumbles upon nine papyri penned in Aramaic by the earliest Christian chronicler of the last days of the carnate Jesus. Motivated by imperial hauteur and plain greed, he smuggles them out and authors an explosive, mega-bucks translation, propelling him to global fame and facilitating the opportunities for deluxe sex that come (one imagines) with being permanently high on the amazon hit-parade. But the blockbuster undermines the credibility of the synoptic gospels, while its visceral yet mundane depiction of the Saviour’s execution raises questions about the Resurrection, and all hell and hallelujah breaks loose. This is ‘The World According To Garp’-meets-‘The Bonfire of the Vanities’, in pint-size.

A pacey, rumbustuous novella, ‘The Fire Gospel’ contains elements of farce, satire, parody à la Monty Python’s ‘Life of Brian’ and ‘Monkey’s Paw’ morality tale. The central conundrum concerns the divinity (or otherwise) of Yeshua/ Jesus/ Isa, a hotly-debated, millennial topic from before the time of the Council of Nicaea (325 AD) onwards, but this book is more Kanga pants and tongue-in-cheek than exploration and deconstruction of heroic angst, the mood, more Steve Martin than Martin Scorsese.

Jesus, a Jew, is viewed in mainstream Christianity as the divine, crucified-and-ascended, End-of-Days Messiah and in Islam as the divinely-inspired, not-crucified-but-still-ascended, End-of-Days Messiah and in both Middle Eastern religions as having been virginally conceived, and so it is the eschatological dogmas of these later monotheistic faiths which Griepenkerl’s translation implicitly challenges.

At its core, perhaps, the tale explores the resilience of the need for myth and icon, sign and symbol, in human consciousness and the centrality of words in the construction of this need. And so, in ‘The Fire Gospel’, the Logos of Christ is replaced by that of the pop-corporate Author. And at times, the narrative does feel rather like a contemporary pop song, spinning on a single groove and with all the mixing-knobs turned-up at full volume. It is a truism (or possibly a cliché) that the most memorable humour arises from darkness, and in this book, in spite of its foundational premise, there is a distinct lack of the night.

If, in places, ‘The Fire Gospel’ strikes one as redolent of a bumper Easter episode of ‘The Simpsons’, maybe it is because the scriptwriters of that magnificent and ambiguous TV series draw on a not dissimilar semiotic palette to Faber. However, occasionally, the text swings a little too close to mildly condescending sixth-form humour for its own good. All of this contributes to a slightly wobbly climax.
 
This leads on to a more profound concern. The incorporation of the destruction of Iraq into a comedic narrative whose major focus (unlike that of, say, ‘M.A.S.H.’, ‘Catch 22’ or Nadeem Aslam’s recent tour de force on Afghanistan, ‘The Wasted Vigil’) does not reside in a dissection of the human consequences of conflict leaves one with a flicker of unease. There is a real danger that through humour, gradually and subtly, a state of Armageddon becomes normalised in the public consciousness. It is disconcerting that writers, publishers and retailers based in the West seem casually to be making big capital out of wars generated by the capital of the West. That there is a lack of self-critical discourse on this matter touches on the issue of freedom of expression, and neither stand-up comedy nor elliptical, amusing critiques such as ‘The Fire Gospel’ can be expected to remedy the deficiency.

Nonetheless (to lighten-up), the book would be a rollicking good read for a train journey on a rainy day and would make an exquisitely mischievous stocking-filler, this Festive Season. The funniest and most effective sections entail Faber’s hilarious depiction, through Griepenkerl’s rise to fame and wealth, of the daft amorality of the corporate book world – a skewed and reductive universe in which Anne Frank, Tony Blair, Harry Potter and Christ are judged solely on the number of products they can shift. Through this series of intentionally bathetic vignettes, which yet carry the intriguing whiff of truth, one comes to realise that in essence, the religions of the world, the capitalist war-machine and the publishing-retailing complex are little more than interlocking systems of institutionalised insanity. The Word, as blood, shit and green-backs.

Faber is a master of prose style and narrative tension and as was the case in relation to his magnum opus, ‘The Crimson Petal And The White’, from the smoking presses of ‘The Fire Gospel’, he has re-affirmed that he is also a skilled literary entertainer. Amen.

Suhayl Saadi is British Council writer-in-residence at George Washington University in Washington DC.

[This article was published in the Scottish Review of Books, The Herald, in October 2008.]

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