Product Description

Having completed the two cycles of legend to which she has devoted her career so far, Anne Rice gives us now her most thoughtful and powerful book, a novel about the childhood of Christ the Lord based on the gospels and on the most respected New Testament scholarship.

The book’s power derives from the passion its author brings to the writing, and the way in which she summons up the voice, the presence, the words of the young Jesus who tells the story.


From the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #97652 in Books
• Published on: 2006-10-31
• Released on: 2006-10-31
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 368 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780345436832
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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From Publishers Weekly
Rice departs from her usual subject matter to pen this curious portrait of a seven-year-old Jesus, who departs Egypt with his family to return home to Nazareth. Rice's painstaking historical research is obvious throughout, whether she's showing the differences among first-century Jewish groups (Pharisees, Essenes and Sadducees all play a part), imagining a Passover pilgrimage to Jerusalem or depicting the regular but violent rebellions by Jews chafing under Roman rule. The book succeeds in capturing Jesus' profound Jewishness, with some of the best scenes reflecting his Torah education and immersion in the oral traditions of the Hebrew Bible. As fiction, though, the book's first half is slow going. Since it is told from Jesus' perspective, the childlike language can be simplistic, though as readers persevere they will discover the riches of the sparse prose Rice adopts. The emotional heart of the story—Jesus' gradual discovery of the miraculous birth his parents have never discussed with him—picks up steam as well, as he begins to understand why he can heal the sick and raise the dead. Rice provides a moving afterword, in which she describes her recent return to the Catholic faith and evaluates, often in an amusingly strident fashion, the state of biblical studies today. (Nov. 7)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From School Library Journal
Adult/High School–In crisp, straightforward prose, Rice leaves the gothic behind and explores the mysteries beneath the childhood of Jesus. At age seven, the boy and his family leave Egypt to return to their home. They find themselves caught in a revolution after the death of the first King Herod, ruler of the portion of the Roman Empire that includes Israel. Although the historical and cultural details are authentic and well done, it is the character of Jesus that drives this novel. He feels like a typical seven-year-old, but he's also suddenly discovering abilities that no one else possesses. He brings clay birds to life, makes snow fall, and even resurrects a dead playmate. Stunned by these odd happenings, he turns to Joseph and Mary for answers. When they are not forthcoming, he's forced to hunt out clues through local legends, rumors, and a strange spirit that taunts him in his dreams. The story is told from Jesus's point of view, and the strength of the book weighs heavily on Rice's ability to make him believable both as a child and as the son of God; she does a winning job. The wisdom of all things religious fills Jesus completely, but he's naive about day-to-day events: he can't understand why a young girl he used to play with prefers at age 12 to learn about weaving and rearing children. This new direction for Rice is both bold and reverent, and is bound to please fans and newcomers alike.–Matthew L. Moffett, Northern Virginia Community College, Annandale
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
God -- in the singular or plural, as deity or idea -- has always been a great subject. From the Bible onward, a host of serious writers including Dante, Milton and Dostoyevsky has wrestled with divinity. More recently, there are so many examples that, in the words of St. John, "I suppose that even the world itself could not contain them." God has figured in a modern version of midrash (a Jewish term for tale-spinning extrapolated from biblical text) by Jenny Diski, who retold the story of Abraham and Sarah in Only Human, and by David Maine, who retold the story of Noah last year in The Preservationist and that of Adam and Eve in this season's Fallen. Among the renderings of Jesus have been Jim Crace's sensuous isolate in Quarantine and Norman Mailer's ecstatic bombaster in The Gospel According to the Son.

Now, say you had to guess the living writer least likely to feel compelled to enter this quest. How about Anne Rice? Known for multi-volume sagas of vampire lore and quasi-literary erotica, Rice has found religion in her new novel, Christ the Lord. On the surface ridiculous, this odd pairing actually makes sense if you consider the vampire Lestat and Jesus as flip sides of the same coin. Both are suffering young men who exist eternally, one by taking life, the other by giving it. And blood figures prominently in their stories.

The notion of Jesus à la Rice has a lot of appeal, especially after reading the first page of her previous book, Blood Canticle, which promises the lures she has reliably provided throughout her career: "a full-dress story . . . with a beginning, middle and end . . . plot, character, suspense, the works." Well, she may deliver elsewhere but not here; these niceties of narrative are uniformly missing from Christ the Lord.

As for the plot, it's a year in the life of a rather plodding 7-year-old boy. As for suspense, he discovers that several mysterious events attended his birth, but we already know that, and so do all the other characters, who are made entirely of cardboard. Mary is innocent; Joseph steadfast; Mary's brother Cleopas laughs so continuously that he might as well be at a vaudeville show; and James, the savior's older brother, glowers throughout the book with big-time sibling rivalry.

Perhaps we could tolerate a one-dimensional cast as long as the narrator/protagonist came alive on the page, but Rice's childhood Jesus is a cipher at the center of the book. Of course, he's also a cipher in Scripture. Interpretations of his nature differ among the four canonical Gospels -- priest, prophet, king or God -- and his early years are virtually a blank slate except for a few tantalizing legends that tell how the young Jesus breathed life into clay birds and, more shocking, killed a local bully. Rice aims to explore this apocryphal domain, but her Jesus is like no other child, not merely because he's begotten by the Creator of the universe but because he shows hardly an ounce of spunk or curiosity. He never burns as either a child or an incipient deity.

Nor do the surroundings of this fabulous tale provide any greater reward. At the beginning of the book, Jesus's family leaves a sojourn in Egypt to enter into a tumultuous Judea. King Herod the elder has just died, and the population is stuck between contending Roman soldiers, rebels and pillaging bandits. But this potentially dynamic setting remains inert. Aiming for scrupulousness based on her self-described extensive research, Rice takes no imaginative leaps and refuses to offer any but the scantest of detail. For example, she describes Jerusalem's Holy Temple as "a building so big and so grand and so solid . . . a building stretching to the right and to the left" so that the reader sees effectively nothing. In fact, real research would have provided abundant imagery, from the billowing purple curtains that veiled the Holy of Holies to the zodiac symbols embroidered upon them.

Worse still, clumsy and outright ungrammatical prose infects every page. For instance, we're told, "Joseph and Mary were cousins themselves of each other, that meant happiness for both of them." Presumably aiming for the resounding echoes of biblical syntax, Rice is merely redundant, so much so that the 300-plus pages of this book feel infinitely longer. Here's a sample of dialogue. Mary says, "Think of all the signs. . . . Think of the night when the men from the East came." Then Joseph says, "Do you think anybody there has forgotten that? Do you think they've forgotten anything. . . . They'll remember the star. . . . They'll remember the men from the East," to which Mary replies, "Don't say it, please. . . . Please don't say those words."

Likewise, the consciousness of the Jesus who narrates is repetitive as well as uninformative. Meeting cousin Elizabeth for the first time, Jesus notes, "I thought her face pleasing in a way I couldn't put into words to myself." Then he describes himself as having "the mind of a child who had grown up sleeping in a room with men and women in that same room and in other rooms open to it, and sleeping in the open courtyard with the men and women in the heat of summer, and living always close with them, and hearing and seeing many things," none of which he shares with us.

Stunned into earnestness by a personal tragedy that she refers to in an afterword, Rice cannot summon any of the literary blood that throbbed through her multiple neck-biters. She strives diligently, but she's so respectful that no messy humanity whatsoever comes from her deity. Christ the Lord is more of an act of personal devotion than the fulfillment of an acknowledgedly audacious fictional concept. It will neither offend believers the way author Nikos Kazantzakis and director Martin Scorsese did in "The Last Temptation of Christ" nor satisfy evangelicals as did Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ." Instead, both audiences are likely to be bored.

Whether Jesus was the soul of mercy or, as some historians have claimed, a political rabble-rouser, the one quality he must have had in order to live through the millennia was spirit. It's the one great quality the Bible has in abundance, as revealed by either the chiseled spareness of Everett Fox's translation of Genesis or the luscious oratory of King James. Rice has sucked the life out of the greatest story ever told.

Reviewed by Melvin Jules Bukiet
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

Anne Rice's New Story
The latest cultural and literary news is that Anne Rice has found Jesus, that she's become a Christian, and that she now wants her writing to reflect her newfound faith and how it's impacted her life. I don't think it's a marketing scheme - she doesn't need the help, quite frankly, and it's not really the demographic her Lestat novels have traditionally been drawing. What has happened, instead, is that a storyteller has found a new story to share, and a new story in which to participate.

Her first novel of a new series is Christ the Lord - Out of Egypt and as an avid reader but not previously a fan, I was pleasantly surprised. In the past, I've tried to read the opening chapters of a few of her other novels, but found it a chore to try to become involved emotionally with characters I ultimately had no love for. This was different, because this book tells a story with which we're already very intimately involved.

The basic premise is this: Jesus and His family have been in Egypt for seven years, sent there to escape Herod's bloody pride (Matthew 2:13-18). The story opens first person, the young Messiah telling His own story of His family's return to Galilee. The Christian reader will most probably have to get over the notion that there's nothing worthwhile to a story like this since it's not in and of itself "scriptural". Rather, because of her writing style and attention to storytelling and detail, the reader can catch a glimpse of something beyond the text - there was some untold story, some unwritten adventure, that Jesus lived out during His formative years.

As I was reading and being introduced to Jesus' extended family - all the cousins and aunts and uncles traveling with Mary and Joseph to Egypt and then back to the Promised Land - I got the distinct impression that Jesus was a Judean John Boy Walton, sharing the adventures and insights that come from having a big family, everyone having a voice and a role to play in the story. The years of relationship, the secrets of the adults kept from the innocence of the children, the interaction of the different generations, the realities of evil and good and everything that comes with sleeping and eating and living in tight quarters - those are the things that become vivid and real for the reader.

I was especially drawn into the first person narration of Jesus - where there's no gospel, nothing else written of Christ's life except His own quotes and parables as recalled by others, I felt like this liberty taken was justified. Did Jesus get sick? Did He have ultimate knowledge from the first, or did He have to learn some things like the rest of us? Did He feel revenge or fear or confusion? What kinds of questions did Jesus ask the teachers that prepared Him for His own questions and stories later on? There might be some issues to be taken doctrinally, but I think it misses the point to make this a theological exercise more than an artistic one. Rice has written her story, sharing her vision perhaps of what Jesus' story was like, even as she's now entered into it with her own talents and weaknesses, all of which probably pour out of this text in an entertaining and enlightening way.

Anne Rice's novel is a tour de force!
The novel is quite a tour de force. Here are some initial impressions. Your mileage of course may vary.

1) Anne Rice has carefully done her homework. I read her Author's Note first (starting page 305), mostly because I wanted to know how she wrote this novel. I'm embarrassed to admit it, but there's a bunch of background information I should have known but didn't. For example, I didn't know anything -- or maybe I've forgotten, I'm nearly 50 -- about Herod Archelaus except that he was Herod's son. But being a wise technical writer, I did a Google search and found a great website that satisfied nearly every niggling historical question I could think of.

[...]

3) I liked how slowly the story of Jesus unfolded as a seven year old boy. In one sense, the entire novel is an extended meditation on St Luke's wondrous words: "And Jesus increased in wisdom and in stature, and in favor with God and man." (Luke 2:52)

Anne Rice demonstrates a certain apophatic restraint in how the young Jesus comes to understand Who He Is. Eastern Orthodox readers who can appreciate mystery ("I will not speak of Your mystery to Your enemies") will certainly appreciate how certain characters (for example, Elizabeth, the mother of John the Forerunner) only discloses certain revelations when it's appropriate to do so. Characters just don't blabber out profound mysteries. Holy mysteries are treated with respect.

Some quirks emerge in Rice's novel. Maybe it just shows how wacko I have become that I loved them. I didn't mind Elizabeth sending John to live out with the Essences after she dies. I didn't mind Joseph, the BVM, and Jesus living in Alexandria and meeting Philo the famous Jewish philosopher! Later, Cleopas, one of the uncles of Jesus, even gives two manuscripts of Philo to a rabbi in Nazareth as a problem. I was charmed. Finally, I didn't mind Jesus performing certain miracles when he was a kid. They really do make sense in the context of the novel. If I can swallow the Protoevangelium of St James, a couple of pseudepigraphical miracles (from the Infancy Gospel of Thomas) shouldn't give me theological indigestion. It wasn't that long ago stories like that gave me The Willies. Maybe this is proof positive that I'm not a Fundamentalist Bible Banger anymore after all!?!?!?

I must admit that it took me nearly 121 pages before I could fully suspend my disbelief. But then Anne Rice snagged me hook-line-and-sinker.

4) What I liked best about the novel is just how Jewish Jesus is. The Jewishness of Jesus in Anne Rice's writing is carefully depicted, right down to some of the gentle humor. (But don't expect any Woody Allen or Mel Brooks jokes!) The character of Jesus is molded in the context of living first-century Judaism. This is where Anne Rice's historical research paid off in spades. For example, Jesus is certainly trilingual, and maybe even quadri-lingual. He knows Greek, Aramaic, Hebrew, and perhaps even a smattering of Latin.

Chapter 17 especially enchanted me. Rice describes the young Jesus meeting three rabbis in the Nazareth synagogue for the first time. The oldest rabbi throws out a series of trick questions to the young Jesus, to test His knowledge of the Law and the Prophets. The Q+A scene is wonderful. Immediately I thought of young Reuven Malter before Reb Saunders in Chaim Potok's magnificent novel, The Chosen. Anne Rice really did a great job of emphasizing the sheer Jewishness of Jesus. The young Jesus she depicts could have been Danny Saunders or David Lurie, other characters out of the novels of Chaim Potok (of blessed memory).

5) In Anne Rice's novel, the young Jesus comes to realize He shouldn't make it snow or stop raining willy-nilly. He understands at an early age that He must only do what the Father wills. Admittedly, this is a very difficult truth to hear and do. Like Jesus, we should seek to give up our opinions and deliberations. Perfect freedom is only in obedience to the will of the Father. All else is slavery to the forces of darkness.

Blandly Profound
The process of self-discovery is hard enough for any young adult. What must it have been like for the Son of the Living God? Anne Rice attempts to get inside the head of the seven year-old Jesus as he gradually learns about the circumstances of his birth and their implications on the meaning of his life.

The dual nature of Christ is the mystery of mysteries. How would Jesus, fully human and fully divine, think and act? Writing in the first person, Rice portrays a boy with questions, worries, and doubts; but also with an inner calm and wisdom just strong enough to suggest the divine. But her young Jesus speaks and thinks with the vocabulary and simplicity of a child (more like a fifteen year-old, actually). This results in a narrative that is somewhat flat and repetitive. Compounding the problem is the plot itself. The story begins with the Holy Family returning to Nazareth from Egypt, with Jesus trying to learn more about the mysteries of his birth he is vaguely aware of. Since we all know the answers, the process of discovery which consumes the whole book becomes rather tedious; I found myself thinking, "come on, tell him already!".

Still, Rice paints an extraordinarily detailed, believable and beautiful portrait of Christ. The book is incredibly well researched. (In fact, the afterword in which Rice discusses her research and her return to the Catholic Church is almost as interesting as the novel itself.) The reader sees the daily life and society of the Jews under Roman occupation in all its beauty and ugliness. One element of the novel I particulary enjoyed was how Rice rehabilitates Joseph. A often neglected or ignored figure in theology and history, Joseph stands out here as a model of fatherhood-- courageous, wise, steady, firm, loving, almost heroic. He is the Father of Our Lord writ small, as it should be.

If you are expecting a page-turner like one of her vampire books, you will be disappointed. If you are looking for a real glimpse of Jesus and the genesis of Christianity, you will not be!