- This extraordinary novel is Tsiolkas’ best yet. It's immensely powerful, provocative and utterly compelling. A must read. It may not appeal to everyone however, as Tsiolkas literally grabs your head and bangs it hard against a concrete wall.
- It's a story of the first century of Christianity, focused on the early apostles and believers particularly Saul, later known as Paul. The times are brutal, rough and primitive, and Tsiolkas doesn’t hold back. He paints a world riven with vicious cruelty, lust and misogyny. His prose is vigorous, earthy and masculine, ‘full of blood and life’. The characters are passionate and quick to anger.
- Society is riddled with religious, political and ethnic wars. The Jews hate the Greeks and vice versa, and they both hate the Romans. It’s an ugly world, with its primitive gods, rituals and superstitions. Baby daughters are routinely killed. Regular beatings of women and slaves are the social norm. Tsiolkas thrusts us into the ugliness, vulgarity and depravity of the poor, the slaves and the lower classes; into their trenches of shit and piss and filth - 'the sounds and stink of poverty’. This book is not for the faint hearted.
- Saul, before conversion, despises these new 'Salvation' communities: ‘...they are disciples of that despised teacher, that would-be prophet, that crucified Nazarene crank’. He works for the Jewish priests, hunting dissenters. He’s a spy, and very prone to anger. He detests 'this strange and disturbing cult'.
- Tsiolkas vividly portrays the radical and revolutionary character of the new movement and its adherents, and the searing fractures dividing them. There is no sentimentality here. The Second Coming was believed to be imminent, though as the decades progress, into the fourth generation, doubt is increasing.
- The chapter on Vrasas, a guard and soldier overseeing Paul at the end of his life in a prison in Rome is simply sublime. What a masculine creation he is. Illiterate, bold and stupid, in subservience to his masters and the Roman gods. Like a modern alt-right anti-Semite extremist, brutalism and violence are his defining features. He detests the Christian sect: ‘This is the most depraved of sects, flesh-eaters and lovers of death’. However his summation of his own life-affirming beliefs is compelling:
'I walk with the sun, I walk in the brightness and life of day, I leave the dead to the crows and to the flies. With every breath my blood is nourished by life. Those who pray to death hate this; that we are alive, that we experience joy, that we also suffer and that we know pain; but all of it, the pleasure and the endurance, all of it is worth it, for it is life: all we have is life'.
- Tsiolkas is very theologically literate. This is essential in making the story compelling. For example, the dispute between Jesus’ twin brother, the illiterate and doubting Thomas, and the educated Paul with his deep knowledge of scripture, over what really matters - the physical resurrection of the Saviour or his teachings - is a key early Christian debate. Tsiolkas never shrinks from immersing the reader in these critical theological issues, though of course some readers will be frustrated.
- One real gem is the tussle between Timothy, Paul's long time friend and scribe, and the preacher Able as they face the challenge of motivating a congregation of believers to 'await the Saviour’s return'. Able is a populist evangelist, and Timothy more conservative and intellectual. The issue is: should we 'remake the world’ or ‘turn the other cheek and retreat from the world’. The believers are divided too - the citizens and the refugees. The refugees abhor the ‘turn the other cheek’ message. They are now proud ‘Christians’. The scene reeks of a Hillsong, modern day Pentecostal assembly.
- There are so many more arguments, debates and issues explored in this extraordinary novel. It is formidable in its scope and ambition. Having being frustrated over recent months with new fiction - so many books started but then put aside - I absolutely devoured this. It was what I was craving. It restored my faith in the power of literary fiction.
- It will undoubtedly dominate the literary awards calendar next year, and be a Booker contender as well.
I found it hard to get into and skim-read the first third. There were so many disparate characters and places not to mention Tsolkas’s overindulgent love affair with squalour, degradation and brutality. Admittedly my minimal knowledge of biblical places and history didn’t help. Perseverance paid off and I followed the second half with much greater interest, even to the point of getting a bible off the shelf. I still think it should have been cut by a third.
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