If you read my review of The Goldfinch, (http://useofabook.blogspot.com/2016/04/sometimes-you-just-dont-know-what-you.html), you know it's not my favorite book. I began reading The Fire Gospel as soon as I finished The Goldfinch, and this is where the "more than a coincidence" part comes in. I found the similarities and differences rather uncanny, almost as if The Fire Gospel, which was published five years earlier, was meant as a sort of corrective to the later novel. Very strange. In each novel a protagonist named Theo finds himself in a museum when a bomb goes off, and not only survives but makes off with a priceless artifact, and neither of them behaves with any particular honor or integrity when it comes to their prize.
Unlike the teenage Theo of The Goldfinch, however, The Fire Gospel's Theo Griepenkerl is a grown-up. Well, sort of. He's a linguistics scholar, a specialist in ancient Aramaic, which is the language of the nine scrolls he pulls out of a shattered sculpture following the bombing of an Iraqi museum in war-torn Mosul. The scrolls form the fifth gospel, the Gospel of Malchus, an eyewitness account of Christ's last days on earth and the period that follows. Rather than turning the scrolls over to his own scholarly institution, Theo translates them and then publishes them, along with his own explanatory material. The book becomes a best-seller, but it also sets off a firestorm of reaction from religious extremists - reactions including public bonfires and even more violent threats - fueled by a media-mad world. Theo is definitely out of his depth.
In describing the success Theo doesn't know how to handle and its dangerous consequences, Faber smartly and stylishly satirizes the publishing and media worlds as well as the reactions of zealots who can't handle the thought of having to shift their thinking to accommodate new ideas or information . It's a well-written, often funny, sometimes shocking and always compelling narrative, and since at 212 pages in paperback it's only about a quarter the size of The Goldfinch, you may be able to read it in a day.
The book group I belong to will be discussing FG next Friday, September 9, but the discussion really began yesterday, when a friend said she'd finished it (in a day) and wasn't sure how she felt about it, except that although Theo's not very likable, the concept of a lost gospel written by an eyewitness is "titillating" and the book is well done. By today she'd decided it is a good read, although it presents a "very unflattering view of humanity . . . it opens the door to discussions on all levels of human experience." On the other hand, another friend said she finds little of merit and that "what the author parodies is not funny. Only very sad." But that's the thing about this book. It gets people thinking.
My feeling is that it is both funny and sad, and that for such a small book, there's a lot to talk about. For instance, the content of the scrolls Theo finds, i.e., the Gospel of Malchus, is very different in tone from the four canonical gospels Christians know. It is easy to see how some readers (both inside and outside the novel) might be offended by the extremely personal, often kvetching, first-person narrative voice of Malchus himself, who freely admits to having been in the employ of Caiaphas the high priest, who says he was there when Judas received his thirty pieces of silver, who claims to be the witness whose ear Peter cut off in the Garden of Gethsemane, and who tells readers more than they want to know about his own ill health, especially his digestive processes and problems. Malchus not only describes his own messy humanity, he also humanizes Jesus in ways that might indeed provoke the kinds of violent responses Theo faces in the novel.
Of course Theo himself is flawed and deeply human, a product of his (our) culture who believes that the titanic act of releasing the "fire" of the newly discovered gospel will somehow save him and perhaps help the rest of humanity. So it makes sense that this evening, while I was looking at some information about Michel Faber, I learned that this novel is part of a series of novels, The Canongate Myth Series (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canongate_Myth_Series), made up of modern re-tellings of traditional myths from various cultures. The Fire Gospel is Faber's take on the myth of the Titan Prometheus, who stole fire from heaven to improve the lives of mortals. So now I have something else to think about in regard to this story; I like that.
