A few years ago I read Michel Faber’s book The Crimson Petal and the White and remember it with sparkling clarity as one of my top ten books read. Since reading that I’ve come to all of Faber’s subsequent books with high expectations, hoping that he will embark on something equally literate, multi-layered, compelling and with a cast of such memorable characters. Unfortunately I am still waiting. What I will grant the author is that he never repeats himself (with the exception of further Crimson Petal fragments contained in The Apple).
I think that part of the problem with this book is that the concept is a little artificial. It forms part of a series called The Myths, in which various publishers have launched:
a bold re-telling of legendary tales – The Myths series gathers the world’s finest contemporary writers for a modern look at our most enduring myths.
It is hard to do this sort of thing without it ending up rather like a creative writing project: there is something about writing to a brief which seems to make otherwise perfectly good writers produce something which reads like its been entered into a short-story competition. That basic creative spark seems to be lacking somehow.
In the case of The Fire Gospel, the myth which Faber retells is Prometheus, who Wikipedia tells us “stole fire from Zeus and gave it to mortals for their use. Zeus then punished him for his crime by having him bound to a rock while an eagle ate his liver every day only to have it grow back to be eaten again the next day”.
Faber tells the story of Theo Griepenkerl who visits a looted museum in Iraq and stumbles upon a “lost” manuscript containing a fifth gospel from a previously unknown witness to Jesus Christ’s last days. Seeing an opportunity to boost his rather lack-lustre career he smuggles the scrolls home and translates them from the Aramaic, and finds a publisher who launches them to an unexpectedly interested world.
This fifth gospel diverges considerably from the other four – the Jesus depicted seems to be shorn of his supernatural powers and by the time he has ended up on the cross has lost all confidence in his mission. His well-known dying words, “It it finished” (signifying the fulfilment of his ministry on earth) are reported by Malchus as “Finish me!” (in other words, end my suffering by finishing me off!).
Unfortunately by allowing Malchus to use this phrase Michel Faber shows an uncharacteristic degree of sloppiness – the word “finish” as in “finish off” is a quite modern construction which would have come from a rather different Greek construction than “tetelestia” (which implies that something has come to an end or has been completed, perfected or accomplished).
Malchus’ gospel goes on to describe the complete moral collapse of the Apostle Peter who after the trial of Jesus cursed the one he had followed and gave himself over to prostitutes and drink.
Needless to say, the Fifth Gospel receives a tempestuous reception and when Theo Griepenkerl embarks on a tour of the USA to promote his book he receives a very mixed welcome. Eventually disaster strikes and the Prometheus them unwinds through Griepenkerl’s life as he meets his own inevitable fate. Unfortunately, on quite basic levels the the plot is full of holes and I could only mention them by spoiling the story for other readers. Suffice to say that Gripenkerl’s enemies display a level of on the one hand lethargy, and on the other kindness, which would be quite uncharacteristic to such committed extremists.
I regret to say that this book is rather weak. It is hard to believe that it is written by the same person who wrote The Crimson Petal. Its as though Sarah Waters suddenly abandoned her complex Victorian epics and branched off into writing a science fiction novella. The book is very short, and could be read in a day, but having completed it, I am left wondering what the point of it all is – except for recasting an ancient myth in modern guise. The character development is weak, the plot is somewhat obvious and the ending predictable. I think I shall have to wait rather longer to be enthralled by another Michel Faber novel.
