Mother of sorrows

This novella tells the story of the Crucifixion from the point of view of Mary. Contrary to art historical belief she was not, we are now told, kneeling at the foot of the Cross nor cradling her son’s broken body in her arms. Instead, she left the scene early, slipping away to save her own skin, stealing to meet her needs as she fled. It’s the sort of idea Carol Ann Duffy might make a poem about, except she’d do it with humour, and without Tóibín’s faintly sententious tone. ‘Memory fills my body as much as blood and bones’; there’s a lot of that kind of thing.

Mary is now an old woman, living out her days under surveillance, somewhere far from her native land. It’s probably Greece. It’s a landscape full of goats and olives and temples to Artemis, the ‘old goddess’ whom Mary feels a strong inclination to worship, because she ‘has seen more than I have and suffered more, because she has lived more’.

Mary is watched over by two men, insistent and unwelcome intruders on her solitude. They are not named, but they might be St John and St Paul. ‘There is something hungry and rough in them, a brutality boiling in their blood’; they feed and clothe Mary, but they persecute her too. What they want is her corroboration of their version of events. To them falls the task of creating a faith, of turning the life and death of Mary’s son (he is not named either) into the basis of a creed. Two other men lurk in the shadows, also bent on controlling history. They are ‘the strangler’ and ‘the man who played dice’, and Mary lives in terror of them. These two want her ‘silence’, while the pututive John and Paul ‘are looking for my voice, my witness’.