The Testament of Mary [Deckle Edge] [Hardcover]

Colm Toibin (Author)

Book Description

Release date: November 13, 2012

Coming in April 2013: A major one-woman Broadway show starring Fiona Shaw, directed by Deborah Warner, and produced by Scott Rudin. Colm Tóibín's provocative, haunting, and indelible portrait of Mary presents her as a solitary older woman still seeking to understand the events that become the narrative of the New Testament and the foundation of Christianity.

In the ancient town of Ephesus, Mary lives alone, years after her son’s crucifixion. She has no interest in collaborating with the authors of the Gospel—her keepers, who provide her with food and shelter and visit her regularly. She does not agree that her son is the Son of God; nor that his death was “worth it;” nor that the “group of misfits he gathered around him, men who could not look a woman in the eye,” were holy disciples. Mary judges herself ruthlessly (she did not stay at the foot of the Cross until her son died—she fled, to save herself), and is equally harsh on her judgement of others. This woman who we know from centuries of paintings and scripture as the docile, loving, silent, long-suffering, obedient, worshipful mother of Christ becomes a tragic heroine with the relentless eloquence of Electra or Medea or Antigone. Tóibín’s tour de force of imagination and language is a portrait so vivid and convincing that our image of Mary will be forever transformed.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Tóibín is at his lyrical best in The Testament of Mary, a beautiful and daring work…it takes its power from the surprises of its language, its almost shocking characterization, its austere refusal of consolation.” (Mary Gordon The New York Times Book Review)

“[An] exquisite novella…Tóibín gives a familiar story startling intimacy.” (The New Yorker)

“A heartfelt, powerful work.” (Sam Sacks The Wall Street Journal)

“Dramatic and poetic…A powerful, devastating story.” (Ron Charles The Washington Post)

“Lovely, understated and powerfully sad, The Testament of Mary finally gives the mother of Jesus a chance to speak. And, given that chance, she throws aside the blue veil of the Madonna to become wholly, gloriously human.” (Annalisa Quinn NPR)

“Mary—silent, obedient, observant—has echoed down two millennia, cementing a potent ideal in the Western imagination. Now the masterful Irish writer Colm Tóibín puts a jackhammer to the cozy, safe, Christmas-card version in The Testament of Mary.” (Karen R. Long Cleveland Plain Dealer)

“A slim, grave, exquisitely emotional book…The Testament of Mary is a spellbinding, surprisingly reverent book.” (Jeff Giles Entertainment Weekly)

“Tóibín applies a Joycean ruthlessness…Imagining himself into Mary’s interior life is his boldest jump yet.” (Hermione Lee The New York Review of Books)

“Tóibín’s intimate approach make Mary feel more credible and human…The result, The Testament of Mary, feels true.” (Claire Cameron The Millions)

“Tóibín suffuses the story with a sense of mystery and makes the reader feel (perhaps as never before) the tragedy of the crucifixion.” (Macy Halford Buzzfeed)

About the Author

Colm Tóibín was born in Ireland in 1955. He is the author of six novels, including The Blackwater Lightship; The Master, winner of a Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and Brooklyn, winner of a Costa Book Award. Twice shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Tóibín lives in Dublin and New York. His play The Testament of Mary, starring Fiona Shaw, directed by Deborah Warner, and produced by Scott Rudin, opens on Broadway April 29, 2013.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 96 pages
• Publisher: Scribner; First Edition edition (November 13, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 9781451688382
• ISBN-13: 978-1451688382
• ASIN: 1451688385
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.9 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (181 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #13,306 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

37 of 41 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Mary As Bitter Mourner January 24, 2013

By Anne Mills

Format:Hardcover

A powerful imagining of how the death of Jesus might have been experienced by his mother -- if in fact his mother was a Judean peasant woman in the first century of the Roman Empire, and not the Queen of Heaven. This Mary is old, she is bitter, and she is very human.

The tale is told by Mary in her old age, living out her life in a house in Ephesus, where two disciples try to get her to remember Jesus life and death as they want to have it remembered. Mary, however, remembers it differently. The story focusses on Jesus' last days and on his death, and Mary does not see this as a glorious event that opens the way to redemption. Or, if Jesus' death was the way to universal redemption, she does not think that her son's agony was worth it. Moreover, her own humanity intrudes into the story that came to prevail. This Mary fled Golgotha in fear for her life, and suffers guilt for that. What she longs for is the long ago, when her son was small and safe, and her husband was with her.

Based on the spread of ratings here and on Librarything, people either like this book a lot, or dislike it intensely. For a believer, it would be hard to like. For a non-believer, it is a moving and beautifully written story of what Mary's experience -- as a mother and a woman in her time and place -- might have been like.

99 of 126 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars 'Bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh...' October 19, 2012

By FictionFan

Format:Hardcover

This short novella is an amazingly powerful account of a mother's love and grief for her son. The fact that that son happens to be, perhaps, the Son of God is secondary. Beautifully written and with some wonderful, often poetic, imagery, Tóibín shows us Mary as a woman who lives each day with guilt and pain that she couldn't stop the events that led her son to the cruel martyrdom of the cross.

As Jesus' followers encourage her to embellish her story to tie in with the legend they are beginning to create, Mary feels that she must tell, even if only once, the true story of her involvement in these momentous events. We see her cynicism and doubt about the miracles attributed to her son; her dislike, contempt even, for those followers who seem intent on feeding his ego, who seem to be provoking his martyrdom to serve their own ends. And most of all we come to understand and almost to share her guilt and fear.

Emotional, thought-provoking, at points harrowing, this book packs more punch in its 104 pages than most full-length novels. Its very shortness emphasises Mary's driven urgency to tell her tale before her chance is gone. Despite the subject matter, it will appeal to lovers of great writing of any faith or none - this story is first and foremost about humanity. Highly recommended.

61 of 83 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Less powerful and moving than I expected October 22, 2012

By Ripple

Format:Hardcover

The subject matter for Colm Tóibín's "The Testament of Mary" is exactly what the title suggests in that it relates Mary's feelings about the death of her son, Jesus, whose name it hurts her too much to even mention. It's a curiously slight offering though. Its 100 odd pages lands it somewhere between short story and novella territory. Even so, with Tóibín's excellence as a writer and the emotive subject matter, I expected to be more engaged with the story than I was.

It's not often that I feel completely ambivalent about a book, but this is one of those times. It's well written certainly but fails to really engage the reader - or at least this reader. It's as if Tóibín is writing on auto-pilot (or given the subject matter perhaps that should be auto-Pilate?) - although that is still a very high standard of writing. It started life as a monologue play and I'm not quite so convinced of the merits of its expansion here.

At the start, it's unclear if Mary is under arrest or just being guarded for her own safety after the death of her son. Told in her voice throughout, there is the expected rage and sadness and most of all a sense of guilt about not failing to intervene in her son's final hours for her own safety. She recalls the story of Lazarus who, once her son had raised him from the dead, seems to be living life as not much more than a zombie with people afraid to even look at him, before describing the last time she saw her son at a wedding, to recalling the events of the crucifiction.

And that's sort of it really.... Of course you feel for a mother who has to watch her only son die in such a terrible way but there is so little of her relationship with him prior to this that she has to tell us rather than show us everything.

The small aspects of the human side don't add a lot to the story that we all know. Like many other authors Tóibín has picked up on the fact that female roles in the Bible tend to be given rather dismissive treatment which he rectifies to an extent.

There seems to be a bit of a surge in faith-based fiction at the moment. This is neither the best, nor the worst of them for me.

In part my lack of conviction about this book might reflect that it follows hard on the heels of a book that really does provide an engaging, visceral and fresh look at the same subject: The Liars' Gospel by Naomi Alderman which I very strongly recommend. Read more ›

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A woman demanding to be heard April 22, 2013

By Acorn

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

In this short novel, Colm Tóibín writes a narrative about events involving Jesus of Nazareth from the point of view of his mother Mary. When her testament is given, she is in old age and feels that death is not far away. She will be glad when it comes. Some of the events she recalls are recent, but most of them hark back to the final weeks of her son's life, a son whom she still misses and whose suffering can never be erased from her mind.

Mary now lives in Ephesus. Her needs are taken care of, and her bills paid, by followers of her dead son. But her relationship with her keepers is neither a happy nor a comfortable one. These men, callow and cold, pester her with questions and ask her to tell all that she can remember. They are writing epistles that they believe will change the world, but Mary harbours doubts as to whether everything they write down is true.

She regrets that when her son still lived at home she did not pay more attention to the company he kept. Like many other young men locally, he left for the city and its promise of a better future, but the stories that eventually came back disturbed her and increasingly made her fearful. There were tales of miracles and insurrection, both threatening to upset the world that she knew. A childhood friend, Marcus of Cana, comes to visit and warns her that the actions of her son are endangering him, his followers and Mary herself.

Mary travels to a wedding in Cana to try and reason with her son, but what she finds is a man beyond recognition. This is nothing like the boy that she knew, the boy who walked off to the temple hand in hand with his father. That was a sight that still fills her with joy.... Instead, the grown man is dressed in fine clothes, surrounded by sycophants and the slightly deranged, and calls himself the son of God. When she fails to connect with him she realises they are all doomed.

From that time, Mary has been watched. First by the spies and thugs of the Roman occupiers and their Jewish collaborators, then later by her son's followers, lean and hungry men who are seeking to refine a neat story about her son and do not want any loose ends. None of these men have respected her or taken her side of the story seriously. They are all concerned with power and control. It is little wonder that apart from the two men who regularly push their way into her house nowadays she permits no man to cross her threshold. She has given up going to the synagogue and prefers the kindliness of the goddess Artemis. In her room she keeps a small statue of the goddess to comfort herself. The other memento she keeps is the chair of her late husband. As for her son, she never mentions his name let alone retains any relics of his life.

In the course of her testament Mary recalls in stark detail the final days and hours of her son's life, the conspiracy manufactured against him and the conspiracy later manufactured in his name. There is a guilty secret at the heart of the crucifixion and it has haunted her to this day. This she must tell before death steals her away.

There are many stories of Jesus: those contained in the Christian Bible, the Islamic Koran and the apocryphal scriptures that were excluded from any holy book. In recent decades more ancient manuscripts with yet more stories have come to light. There are many inconsistencies and most of the stories were written long after the events being described.

Colm Tóibín is not adding yet another contender for the scriptures, but instead tells a story from the point of view of a mother wracked by guilt and grief. It is a tale that will resonate with anyone who knows the pull of family and the difficulties of coping with the dissonance between the children we knew and the often strange adults they become. Although this story is grounded in religions of the Middle East it is about emotions and relationships that are recognisably universal.

Tóibín is a wonderful writer and the restrained prose of this novella contains a depth of feeling that makes for a moving and sad tale. Mary is both an innocent victim of circumstances and a knowing critic of the predicament in which she lives. What did all that history mean? And in the end was it all worth something? As her life draws to a close she is adamant that her voice be heard. Read more ›