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Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt

by Anne Rice

Chatto & Windus, $261

Oxford scholars,  in their notes to The Bible: Authorised King James Version, say  Jesus Christ was 'one of the most formative characters in human history'. He was a preacher of renewal among the Jews, a prophet in the Judaic tradition, and 'a trenchant critic of hypocritical religiosity'.

He did not, however, denounce Judaism, nor did he found any new religion. He was an innovator and sought to preach the kingdom of God. What he got, instead, were churches that preached Jesus, the scholars say.

For Anne Rice, coming to understand the significance of Judaism in the life of the boy called Jesus bar Joseph bar Jacob was the result of long study and reflection. In July 2002, she decided she was 'ready to do violence to my career' in order to understand Jesus.

The result is Christ the Lord, which is being greeted with surprise - surprise that an author such as Rice, whose milieu is the dark, godless world of witches and vampires, should write about the life of Christ. Surprise that the book is so bright and full of light as to throw her previous 20 novels into sharp relief.

'Is Christ our Lord not the ultimate supernatural hero, the ultimate outsider, the ultimate immortal?' she poses, with perhaps a touch of irony, in an author's note at the conclusion of the book.

Christ the Lord is an outstanding piece of writing. The prose dazzles, there's scarcely a word out of place, and its pace is a carefully calibrated emotional ride that moves  from the deepest depths of fear amid bloody massacre to the last sobs of a scared child held safe in his mother's arms.

Although Luke in the New Testament held that Jesus was 12 years old when these events took place, Rice for her own reasons  chose the most delicate age for any child, that of seven going on eight. It's a time when, as Joseph says to Jesus: 'You're little, but not little enough, and you're a big boy, but not big enough.'

Told in first-person narrative through the Christ child's eyes, the story begins with the return of Joseph and Mary, and their familial entourage from Alexandria in Egypt to Nazareth in Judea. The supremely evil King Herod is dead.

But when Jesus asks about Bethlehem where he was born, and what happened there, he is met with silence. He is becoming aware he is different from other boys. He can make things happen, and it scares him.

'I knew something that was beyond what I could put into words,' says Jesus. Over the years, he begins to find the answers to his questions, and Rice builds suspense around how the boy  will react when he learns the truth about himself, and what it means.

Rice imagines a life for Jesus that is only sketched in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, drawing on the cast of mentioned characters, including his 'strange, solemn' cousin John, 'who said so little and looked at me so much'. She adds some fictional players, such as uncle Cleopas, through whom the

whys and wherefores of Judaic law are explained.

It was the mystery of the Jews that drew Rice back to God and the  Catholic Church in 1998 after  40 years of absence. Raised in a conservative Irish-American parish, the 18-year-old Rice was unable to accept its claim to be the one true church.

Her research for this book is extensive, her evocative descriptions of place and time precise. Here are the 'green fields and forests of thick trees ... so many trees' around Nazareth - a garden compared with the parched and dusty lands of today - and 'fields of wheat ... flowering almond trees, villages of white houses tumbling over the hills'.

Jesus splits his days between learning at the feet of the rabbis - he speaks Greek, Aramaic and Hebrew - and working with his carpenter father, all of which is described in the succinct detail one has come to expect from Rice.

Her backgrounds are carefully rendered too. His is not a childhood of innocence. He has seen people - men, women and children - slain by sword and spear, and knows it takes two days for a crucified man to die.

Rice is convincing in her portrayal of the young Jesus, but there is more here than that. We are hearing the story of an older Jesus, who says in an aside, 'I am trying to tell you this story from the point of view of the child that I was', which takes the book to an entire other level.

Before anyone goes all Dan Brown, the scholars  say everything we know about Jesus is hearsay because, 'like  ... Buddha, Jesus did not write a word'.



Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt