The crucifixion is as though a lot is going on at the time – the drama, fires lighting, a lot of noise – it’s a hugely noisy painting. Tóibín has said that the inspiration for the novella came in the first place from Tintoretto’s Crucifixion, which he chanced across when he was on holiday in Venice: A woman largely silenced by history – our perception of whom, in Tóibín’s opinion, was largely manufactured by John. Indeed, if, in his fiction, he has long been preoccupied with giving voice to mothers and housewives, then it is only the natural conclusion to give voice to the Mother of Christ.
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It is, in some ways, an incantation on Tóibín’s part to help free the women of his country and elsewhere from the unrealistic and downright bizarre expectations that have been put upon them by the Catholic Church and others. A woman who baulks at John’s suggestion that her son was conceived not out of human love but by the Immaculate Conception. He has given her the voice and soul of a wonderful, ordinary woman, made of flesh and blood. In this book Tóibín – himself, of course, a lapsed Irish Catholic – has made his Mary represent Ireland, which has long identified itself with her virginity and her role as the eternal mother, in a new, utterly different way. If Tóibín’s Mary seems reminiscent of the mothers who populate his fiction and, in particular, his story collection, Mothers and Sons, or reminiscent, perhaps, of a classic Ireland-representational female figure like Bridie in William Trevor’s ‘The Ballroom of Romance,’ then it is not through laziness but through the desire that his Mary should represent contemporary Ireland. The wish, indeed, to no longer feel guilty for being simply human. The wish to no longer be haunted by guilt for things over which they could have no control. This may as well also be the wish, or the daily incantation, made by the Irish people as they wake from the long dream that the Catholic Church has held them under.
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Until I died I hoped that I would live in full recognition of the two.’ And I wanted what happened, what I saw, what I did, to belong to the day. ‘I wanted dreams to have their place, to let them belong to the night. A world where the best we can hope to manage is what Mary hopes she has been able to manage at the end of her life: A world indeed where God does very probably not exist but where the idea of Him haunts the spaces we inhabit and the ideas that we formulate. Because The Testament of Mary is very much in the style and tradition of a typical Tóibín novel or short story, in that it describes a world full of mystery marked by strange symbols a world by no means devoid of love but a world where, to all appearances at least, we are essentially alone. In The Testament of Mary, that vision, if anything, makes more sense. And through that we see, perhaps more clearly than ever before, Tóibín’s own vision of the world, the vision which has informed darkly luminous works such as The Blackwater Lightship and The Empty Family.
Tóibín does not make any grand claims for it he does not seek to say that this is the defining story of Mary but rather that this is as close and as honest an imagining of her that he, by flexing all of his considerable literary talents, has been able to achieve. It is a book worthy of the highest critical praise, not only for its peerless literary style – which we have come to expect from Tóibín – but for its imaginative and philosophical reach.
Her life ends with her praying to Artemis, the many breasted fertility God and descending in her mind into a city like ‘an opal set in emerald.’ So it is indeed a reassuring sign of changing attitudes, especially, you would have to say in Tóibín’s native Ireland, that The Testament of Mary has so far attracted only literary praise and a complete absence of religious intolerance. A Mary who is distrustful, almost to the point of active dislike, of the apostles, who appear boorish and at times even sinister – not least John, the man who comes to put words into her mouth and convince her that she is the Mother of God. ‘If it had been some years ago, they would have leapt on it, but now they’ve got other things.’Īnd leapt on it they most certainly would have done because The Testament of Mary is told from the point of view of a Mary who believes that Jesus is possibly ‘out of his mind’ and who will not speak his name anymore because it is too associated with what he became, as opposed to the child that she raised. ‘I don’t think the ecclesiastical people have any authority,’ Colm Tóibín recently told the Sydney Morning Herald. John Lavin commends Colm Toibin’s The Testament of Mary, a philosophical and literary exploration of the story of Mary.
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