The Messiah (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics) [Paperback]

 

 

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This book was written in the early 1950's, and like any satire it takes its start-point from the world at its time of writing. Great satire, I am coming increasingly to realise, does not fade with the memory of its immediate context because it depicts things that are deep and nasty and recurrent. The tripartite first chapter of Vidal's Messiah sets his real tone with a solemnity that can be mentioned in the same breath as the greatest of all recitatives with which Handel launched a masterpiece by the same name. Read it, if I may suggest, slowly, and take in carefully what it is saying, and after you have finished the book read that first chapter again. Its tone is entirely different from the rest of the book, or at least there are only a few momentary suggestions of that tone later. However the tone is one thing, the manner in which the basic message is suitably presented. The message itself is the thing; and the message is what we, humanity, are doing when we indulge ourselves in 'faith'.

If ever a book was a parable for our times in 2008, this book is that. Egotist though he was, I can't imagine that Vidal would have expected to get just this close to what has happened. He was there in the post-war world, the true New American Half-Century itself, the era of the Cold War, before any such expression as New American was thought of, envisaging a world predicted in The Goncourt Journals of 1861 'when all modern nations will adore a sort of American god'. With the end of the cold war it has suddenly stopped looking like this. The sort of American god who invented the cold war and the catechism of questions about who were the goodies and who the baddies, who were trying to Take Over the World and who were correspondingly Defending Freedom, was J Foster Dulles. Relieved of the burden of answering the questions correctly, the rest of the world has gone its own way as it had always wished to do. The One Remaining Superpower is finding itself isolated through assuming without first asking that it will be followed in foreign policy, and economically stretched in consequence. At the same time an unregarded religion that never went through a Reformation has emerged from the shadows in a threatening and unexpected form, part protest against colonialist misprision, but startlingly in this day and age asserting, in some quarters at least, a mission of its own to bring death or conformity of belief to the whole world.

Vidal does not just ask how humanity gets itself into positions like this, he boldly answers the question in his first chapter, and in my opinion he speaks true. Faith fills a vacuum. It outsources our thinking. It speaks to what Housman called 'the habit of treading in ruts and trooping in companies that men share with sheep'. What seems to me to have happened, now in 2008, is a neat and astonishingly precise inversion of what Vidal foresaw. V envisaged a secular faith overturning centuries of Christianity: in the event secularism has been caught off-guard by mediaeval certainty, scripture and mantras, while trying to beat back a degenerate Christian version of much the same that persists in its own back yard like bindweed.

The much-despised Oxford linguistic philosophers really have the key to the matter. What is the relationship of faith or belief to 'truth'? None, or only accidental. However, capture the vocabulary and you are in the driving seat. Mr K Rove was not the first (by a long way) to know that. Give the scattered sheep something to rally round and, in the right circumstances, they will rally round it. Add an evaluative dimension, a suggestion of right v wrong, then some ad-hoc spicing of treason to the allegations, then an additional appeal to arms for self-defence, and you have a formula for unending wars over nothing whatsoever. The great standard to capture is 'Truth', which is a hymn to be sung and only fortuitously connected with anything that might, by rational criteria, be evaluated as 'true'. Capture that and your enemies are the votaries of falsehood and lies, so they had better mind out, and thus do we have much of human history.

At the story-level, the focus of the new faith is reminiscent of Waugh's Mr Joyboy, an assistant mortician with the initials J C. The contemplation of cadavera had instilled in him an outreaching sense that the cadavera have it right and that life is a bit of a burden. From this point his teachings advance to near-total domination of the USA, and by the end we don't know how the battle between the death-dedicated USA and the then-presumably-life-centred ROW has it worked out. The book is really a joy to read if you get a few of the references and have some background in Catholicism. The history of the Church and its attitude to 'truth', the magnificent architecture painting and music - try rejecting that if you come from where I come from and react to music the way I do - intellectually, it's all bolony. In the 50's 'Messiah' was apparently attacked for 'blasphemy', that being a kind of lingo that some talked in those pre-enlightened times. Whatever (if anything) 'blasphemy' means this use of it is not my own idea of offence to the Deity. My idea of staying hopefully on the right side of any putative Creator of an animal race politely described as 'intelligent' is not to pretend to speak in His name. Attempts to enrol Him to various American causes I shall avoid for fear of thunderbolts that such insolence is inviting.

Compulsory reading on pain of loss of intellectual status.

Messiah, I believe is Gore Vidal's satirical masterpiece. This brilliant but deeply unsettling book, first published in 1954 is very prophetic. Despite the reaction to the book when it was published, Messiah, is not a blasphemous book. It is not a gloating destruction of Christianity but an understated, chilling look at the power of a manipulated mass media. This is a novel that works on several levels and has a wide appeal. It's a great work of satire for those who would like to see how great satire works. Its full of tasteless jokes and cheeky little parallels that ring bells in the mind of the reader. The most obvious 'gag' is the name of the new 'messiah', John Cave; the initials are J.C., get it? The original JC was a humble carpenter, the new JC is a humble mortician's assistant who decorates corpses. The 'Caveites' message is simple, death is nothing and is to be welcomed and the message of Christianity is subverted and turned on its head. There are parallels throughout the novel between the rise of the 'Caveites' and the rise of early Christianity. The continuous revision and re-writing of doctrine, for example, long after the death of the 'messiah' to suit present needs is a theme that Vidal returns to in other grat novels such as, 'Julian', and, 'Live from Golgotha'. We see how an essentially simple message is bloated by dogma, and religion is reduced to an apparatus of control as yesterday's persecuted become today's leaders of the inquisition. Back in 1954 Vidal was aware of the potential power of the TV and mass media and how it can be manipulated with those with the know how and the contacts. The new 'messiah's' right hand man is not a fisherman but a savvy Hollywood PR guru who ruthlessly exploits the mass media and John Cave's strange charisma to devastating ends. Fans of Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein's, 'No Logo', or anyone who believes in the mass media's power to change, redefine and create attitudes and philosophies almost overnight will find this book striking a few chords because what really works in this novel is that the whole plot is so plausible. The reader is left with the feeling that this really could happen and it could happen any day.

Very intense but a great read IMO , think it must be a satire of 1950 American politics , religious zeal , McArthy witchhunts , anti-communist post war stuff . Must have been very controversial when first published , I have also read The Judgement of Paris which is much 'lighter' but still full of great ideas and thoughts ( in my opinion again ) . Vidal is a great 'ideas' man and polemiscist but I'm not sure everyone would enjoy his work but I do !

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Published 19 months ago by Mr. Norman Bright

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