ALL the best titles have been used, and it would seem, too, that all the best stories have been told. Not that this prevents novelists from retelling them. No story could be bigger, or more well-known, than that of Jesus Christ, whose remarkable short life as narrated in the Gospels lies at the heart of the Christian faith. There have been various biographies, but one might wonder how, or, more importantly, why any writer would attempt to retell this story as a novel.
Following such works as The Armies of the Night (1968), The Executioner's Song (1980) Ancient Evenings (1983) and Harlot's Ghost (1991), Norman Mailer, whose life-long obsession is the subject of power, particularly American power, frequently turns to fact for his fiction, and now revisits Christ's life in The Gospel According to the Son (Abacus, £14 in UK).
How inspired or imaginative or original could such a novel hope to be? Could anyone, even Mailer, dare to either re-invent or subvert a story rooted in tradition, a story which is tradition? Is it an act of audacity or opportunism to do so? Pop psychology, speculation or blatant plagiarism at best, laziness at worst? Could it offend? Consider the continuing insult caused to the Muslim community by Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses? Yet as fiction is an art form, no one's life, not even Christ's - at least not in the context of fiction - appears to be sacred. There are no rules.
Interestingly, Mailer, famous for being intellectually pugnacious, or sometimes just pugnacious, has not attempted a daring reinvention or reinterpretation of the life. Nor does he directly challenge the gospel accounts. He leaves Jesus to do that. "While I would not say that Mark's gospel is false," begins the Son in his "autobiography", "it has much exaggeration. And I would offer less for Matthew, and for Luke and John, who gave me words I never uttered and described me as gentle when I was pale with rage." Mailer's Jesus, aware that the versions offered by the Evangalists were written years after his death, has decided that "such tales are to be leaned upon no more than a bush that tears free from its roots and blows about in the wind. So I will give my own account . . . I would hope to remain closer to the truth." Yet while he dismisses them, Mailer's Jesus does not stray far from the gospels. Each of the famous episodes is recalled more or less as they have always been taught.
Mailer's Jesus describes his early life as one of apprenticeship, dedicated to the craft of carpentry. On completing his training at the age of 27, he continued working under Joseph, his stepfather. While the other young apprentices had been jealous of him "because they looked upon him as my father", Jesus recalls how Joseph served God "by treating all of his workers with as much respect as he gave to his work".
There are few surprises here. Mailer neither questions nor swaggers. Nor is there anything like the imaginative drive, atmosphere, deft characterisation and humour which shape Jim Crace's lively Booker contender, Quarantine, which is also set in the Judea of two thousand years ago and also has a Christ-figure as one of the characters. Unlike Crace, who tells his story through a third-person narrative, Mailer speaks in the first-person. No doubt Mailer believes he has humanised the man behind the myth. His Jesus is a feisty individual with a heightened poetic sensibility, and is given to vivid dreams. He is hero, and sacrificial victim; loving son of a distant father; visionary; betrayed leader; a man of destiny as well as one impatient finally to tell it as it was. Jesus, in Mailer's version, knows what he has to do yet also experiences doubt, confusion, resentment, even fear. On the way to Gethsemane, Jesus prays and, according to Mailer, says: "I wanted to live in less terror." Elsewhere, aware that his enemies are closing in on him, he reports: "On this morning I was no longer the Son of God but only a man. God's voice was weak in my ear; a low fear was in my heart."
Sexual arousal is introduced to the sequence in which Jesus rescues Mary Magdelene. However, Mailer does not create a Jesus who is involved with women or who fathers children. But Christ is given two brothers, James and John, as well as a difficult relationship with Mary, his mother. "Moreover [hardly Biblical, that]; if Mary was modest, she was also vain, and I would suffer by both ends, for her will was graven in stone. Yet she did not see herself as strong, but frail. Worse! She saw me as being like her, and therefore unready to go out into the world." Mailer has also presented him with a beguilingly honest, forthright voice which is created - and sustained - by a lyric, quasi-Biblical language itself formal, and also seductively beautiful.
Of his forty days in the desert, Jesus recalls being weak and hungry but "since I was not there to dispute Him but to follow His will, fasting grew easier". The temptation has the expected drama. But then, all of the incidents do, particularly the almost balletic betrayal choreographed by Judas.
For all the inevitability of a life dictated to by duty and fate, Mailer succeeds in subtly drawing in his favourite theme: power. Even though Jesus is acting out his role as written, there is a growing sense of his asserting himself, of tentatively testing his godly powers as well as the faith of his new followers. It is as if he is assessing his own rise and fall. Except, of course, there is a difference. Having reported "Then I died", Jesus is also in the unusual position of being able to recall, ". . . I know that I rose on the third day."
Mailer's novel is not a radical variation on the version we know. Nor is it the extended Jewish biblical joke it could have become in Joseph Heller's hands - remember King David's jaunty tone in God Knows? (1985). On the surface Mailer has done little more than tell us a wonderful story we already know. But it is the way he tells it which surprises, impresses and charms. The telling is graceful, gracious, consistent and, by his standards, surprisingly understated. It is not until the end of the book that Mailer's more forceful persona surfaces.
Above all, though, Christ's life, is, as we know, quite a story. The Gospel According to the Son is a compellingly beautiful performance, and yet another strong offering from a major American novelist in a literary year dominated by Edmund White, Phillip Roth, Thomas Pynchon and, most recently, and conclusively, by Saul Bellow and Richard Ford. Mailer will impress. But let's face it, with a story as good as Christ's - and with Christ himself telling it - could Mailer, or anyone else, possibly fail?