MUCH TO DISOCOVER IN THIS BOOK DESPITE THE FEW SPOILERS IN THIS REVIEW.
The word Gospel (and also Evangelho, in Saramago’s original Portuguese title) means “good news”; but there is no good news in this story of Jesus Christ according to the atheist José Saramago.
For the first seventy pages or so out of 350, he sticks reasonably close to the Biblical accounts, but filling the story out: for instance by describing in some detail the story of the journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem for the census; or by dropping in well-researched details, for instance of the lay-out of the Temple or the way that men (like Joseph) normally treated their wives (like Mary). But Saramago also takes quite a few liberties with the Gospels, such as having a mysterious beggar rather than the archangel Gabriel making the Annunciation. But in the first few chapters of the book these liberties are not subversive of the Gospel story in any profound sense.
Every now and then, Saramago addresses the reader directly, sometimes telling him what he (the author) is doing; at other times with sardonical observations like asking how God could be pleased with the disgusting scenes and stenches as animals were sacrificed to him at the Temple - the revulsion against sacrifices is one of the recurring themes of the book.
The first significant departure from the Gospels relates to the Massacre of the Innocents. What is not so important is how Joseph learns of the impending massacre - though this is not in the way told in Matthew’s Gospel; but rather the guilt that fell on Joseph and - by extension (so it was told) on his baby son - for having done nothing to warn the parents in Bethlehem of what he had learnt. From now on, invented narratives follow thick and fast.
Saramago has invented a terrible fate for Joseph; so Mary’s first grief is for her husband; and Jesus, too, still a boy of thirteen, grieves for him, and, learning of the guilt Joseph had felt, himself felt guilty that he had been saved when so many had been slaughtered. It gives him nightmares in which he dreams that his father (Father?) was out to kill him; and presently they drive him from his home and he makes for the Temple in Jerusalem, a journey again told in great detail. At the Temple he searches out a scribe and asks him about the theology of inherited guilt: the answer he receives confirms his terrible burden.
There is a continual wrestling with theological questions: is all the suffering in the world part of God’s inscrutable plan or is God’s will thwarted by human actions, performed because we are free but for which we will be punished? Or are there in fact two rulers of the world: God and Satan?
More inventions follow to fill in the unknown years of Jesus’ adolescence. Jesus takes a job in the wilderness as a shepherd, under a mysterious Master; and much play is made of the way he looks after the sheep and will not offer a lamb up for sacrifice at the Temple.
When Jesus is eighteen Saramago has God appear to him and tell him that he has a mission for him, whose nature will become clear in due course. The mysterious Master dismisses him and Jesus makes his way back to Nazareth. Now there are some evocations of the Gospel story, distorted though they are: he meets the fishermen Simon and Andrew, James and John whose nets he fills - he himself does not know how - with fish. He meets Mary Magdalen, loses his virginity to her and for many days is initiated by her into all the pleasures of the Song of Solomon. His brief return to his home in Nazareth is again invention, except that his brothers do not believe him when he tells the family that he had seen God. So he returns to Mary Magdalene, who does believe him; and they live together, leaving Magdala as Jesus continues helping the fishing community with the gift - of bringing in more fish, of calming a storm on the lake - he does not himself understand. By the time of the wedding at Cana, he is assured of his power. (Saramago makes the bride one of Jesus’ sisters and the groom a kinsman of Andrew’s. He will also conflate Mary Magdalene with Mary of Bethany, so making her a sister of Lazarus whose Gospel story he will also subvert.)
By the time Jesus is twenty-five he knows he has the power to perform miracles; and when a madman calls him the Son of God, he starts to believe this himself. This is confirmed by God Himself, over forty days, in a second encounter which is not to be found in the Gospels and which is the crux of the book. God tells Jesus exactly what He has in mind for him, and that purpose of his martyrdom is that God’s reign shall be acknowledged not only by the small Jewish tribe but by Gentiles for centuries to come. When Jesus asks Him whether that will mean an end of human suffering, God has to say that suffering and martyrdoms will continue and He produces an alphabetical list running over many pages of the way in which martyrs will be put to death down the ages for bearing witness to Him. Countless others will be martyred by the Inquisition because they don’t believe the current orthodoxies about Him. There will be bloody wars and slaughter without end in His name and in the name of His enemies. And the reason for the continuation of all this suffering is that, as God’s reach grows, so also does that of the Devil who, it is now confirmed, has appeared several times in this story since the beginning and who is indeed present also during this encounter. The Devil makes an offer to God: to avoid all this suffering he proposes that God should forgive him his past offences and to allow him back as an obedient subject into the Heavenly Kingdom from which he had been expelled. God rejects the offer: the Good he represents cannot exist without the Evil represented by the Devil.
To me the weakest part of the book is that, with all these horrors foretold, Jesus does not go on strike! He accepts the mission and it is only now, some 50 pages from the end of a 350 page book, that he enlists his twelve disciples and embarks on his ministry.
Perhaps needless to say, these last pages again jumble up and change elements of the Gospel story more than ever. Suffice it to say that Saramago ends this novel, as he would end his later novel “Cain” (see my review) with an indictment of God: here the last words of Jesus on the Cross are “Men, forgive Him, for He knows not what He has done.”
Regrettably Saramago, as always, spoils an ingenious story by indulging in the wilful and entirely pointless mannerism of not using quotation marks and, worse than that, not even having a separate line between one person and another person speaking. It makes the long debates and discussions particularly difficult to follow. There are in any case hardly any paragraph breaks and the punctuation is wilfully eccentric also. It’s a pity that the translator, Giovanni Pontiero, probably did not have the right (and might not have had the wish) to present the work in a more user-friendly form.
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