![]() ![]() After his resurrection, Lazarus comes to see Jesus, but the disciple Peter tries to put him off, tells him that Jesus is sleeping: “What he did today wasn’t easy.” Lazarus responds, “This time yesterday I was dead. “In the Book of John, Lazarus has a non-speaking role,” Beard reminds us, but here he gets his say. Poc.īut there is comedy, too, from the literal interpretation of the Bible story as a human experience. To have children of his own and to show them the glory of the Temple. The decision to be good, or the chance once more to see Lydia naked. One thing after another, and Lazarus plucks imaginary objects from the air. It doesn’t matter how much anyone learns. His thoughts and memories and feelings have come to nothing. “This eliminates tuberculosis and smallpox.” It is also a gut-wrenching and visceral story, a grisly and pain-wracked descent from life toward death. The condition is “so familiar that the bible doesn’t need to describe it.” Beard adds that we know the illness was fatal, but not infectious: Lazarus lived with his sisters, who remained unaffected. When John writes that Lazarus was sick, what was he suffering from? He “records no specific symptoms,” reports Beard. There is playfulness in Beard’s forensic analysis of biblical verses. “Doesn’t the messiah come back from the dead?” Beard also explores why the disciples themselves might see Lazarus as a threat. (One might think of Jim Crace’s Quarantine and its alternate take on the origins of Christianity.) As Lazarus’s health declines, local priests and Romans alike are watching him for his friendship with the dangerous Jesus, or, later, wondering if Lazarus himself might be the much-promised saviour. ![]() The similarity of Lazarus and Jesus in childhood, their closeness, returns as a more complex thought: the potential for Lazarus to usurp Jesus’ place in the Christian story is a central element of the book. Every drowning makes its contribution to the glory. If Jesus is the son of god, then all stories before and after exist in the service of this one incredible story. This must be so, otherwise no one would be frightened for the disciples in the storm. Blameless families are required to grieve. Innocent people must drown in Lake Galilee. Indeed, Beard is brutally balanced in his approach, reminding us that in John 11:6, Jesus remained at a distance from Lazarus as his death approached, all the better to ensure an unignorable death and a memorable miracle. ![]() Lazarus thinks back to his childhood friendship with Jesus: “as children in small-town Nazareth, the boys could barely be told apart.” Lazarus returns again and again to a pivotal event in their childhood with another friend, Amos, in which Jesus does not come out well and which is decisive in parting the young friends. He turns to a healer, Yanav, who “likes sick people with active imaginations who thrive on close attention,” and whose treatments unsurprisingly fail to help. ![]() “His life is ordered, successful, unusual he doesn’t need enlightenment.” He attempts to carry on with life and work through a worrying decline in health each time Jesus performs a miracle, his condition deteriorates. In Beard’s story, Lazarus is a businessman. Front of stage in his own book, Lazarus here becomes a man in full. The only gospel which mentions Lazarus is John, and for a man who is Jesus’ “only recorded friend”, his story is short. It is both respectful to the biblical scriptures, and more observant than they are to Lazarus’s own story. It is a novel, a biography, and a study in fiction and storytelling. Lazarus is Dead is described on the jacket as “genre-bending,” though blending might be more apt. Perhaps a contemporary allegory? In fact, such category issues are central to the book. (I had better add, in case anyone suspects slippery phrasing, that this is that book.) I’m not sure what I thought Lazarus is Dead would be: not quite a ‘religious spoof’ as the Edinburgh Book Festival crassly categorised it. Occasionally you read a novel which entirely subverts your expectations and, in doing so, becomes one of your favourites of the year. ![]()
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