SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2013Ĭolm Tóibín's The Testament of Mary is the moving story of the Virgin Mary, told by a novelist famous for writing brilliantly about the family.įrom the author of Brooklyn, in a voice that is both tender and filled with rage, The Testament of Mary tells the story of a cataclysmic event which led to an overpowering grief. To learn more about how and for what purposes Amazon uses personal information (such as Amazon Store order history), please visit our Privacy Notice. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie Preferences, as described in the Cookie Notice. Click ‘Customise Cookies’ to decline these cookies, make more detailed choices, or learn more. Third parties use cookies for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalised ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. This includes using first- and third-party cookies, which store or access standard device information such as a unique identifier. If you agree, we’ll also use cookies to complement your shopping experience across the Amazon stores as described in our Cookie Notice. We also use these cookies to understand how customers use our services (for example, by measuring site visits) so we can make improvements. It did not really work for me, though I can recognise that Tóibín writes well.We use cookies and similar tools that are necessary to enable you to make purchases, to enhance your shopping experiences and to provide our services, as detailed in our Cookie Notice. I have no doubt that, for many, Christians and non-Christians, this will work. Not one of you was normal.) In short, she is first and foremost a mother, not a follower, not a disciple, not a believer and it is as a mother that Tóibín presents her. Men who were seen smiling to themselves, or who had grown old when they were still young. ( He gathered around him, I said, a group of misfits, who were only children like himself, or men without fathers, or men who could not look a woman in the eye. ‘Everyone in the world will know eternal life.’ ‘Those who came before him and those who live now and those who are not yet born,’ he said. ‘His suffering was necessary,’ he interrupted, ‘it was how mankind would be saved.’ She is forewarned by a man called Marcus and she is encouraged to flee before he is arrested, which she does.īut Mary is sceptical of the whole business. In particular, we follow the events leading up to the Crucifixion. We follow her account of major events that are recorded in the Bible, such as the Raising of Lazarus and the Wedding at Cana. She recounts how he moved from being her lovely son to a man who was surrounded by people she mistrusted, who manipulated him for their own political ends and who made him out to be the Son of God, a view she did not share. Maybe before I die I will say the name or manage on one of those nights to whisper it but I do not think so.) She is telling her story to the gospel writers (something for which, of course, there is absolutely no historical evidence whatsoever and almost certainly never happened), now living in Ephesus, in the safe house John has found for her, fearing that she might have been arrested as others associated with him were. So we call him ‘him’, ‘my son’, ‘our son’, ‘the one who was here’, ‘your friend’, ‘the one you are interested in’. ( I cannot say the name, it will not come, something will break in me if I say the name. She usually refers to him as my son, never by name.
The story shows Mary as a human, telling her story of her grieving for her son.
Tóibín says he was inspired by Tintoretto’s Crucifixion. This book tells Mary’s story from well after the death of her son and tells it not as a woman who is convinced of her son’s divine nature but purely as a mother who loves her son. As well as writing this novel(la), there was also a stage version, which was far less successful than this book. Tóibín has already written about mothers (his book of essays was called New Ways to Kill Your Mother) so, perhaps, it was inevitable that he should write about one of the most famous fictional mothers, the Virgin Mary. I must admit that Tóibín has never really worked for me and this book does not change my views. Home » Ireland » Colm Tóibín » The Testament of Mary Colm Tóibín: The Testament of Mary
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