gimley reviewed The fire gospel by Michel Faber
Review of 'The fire gospel' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
I read this while also reading The Great Partnership (which I haven't yet finished) after finishing The Book of Strange New Things. So, I was (and still am) immersed in religion, but this is really more of a book about publishing and the book industry.
Books used to be significant things. The Bible didn't start off competing with crime fiction and didn't get liked on the internet but was a compendium of everything that was considered worth saying at the time. It didn't have a genre, or an author. God didn't promote it on book tours. The idea of a book being holy is almost anachronistic. A book is a commercial property now and in some ways, so are our lives.
Theo's girlfriend trades up for a better product while he is off in the birthplace of civilization turned war zone. In the midst of life and death Theo and …
I read this while also reading The Great Partnership (which I haven't yet finished) after finishing The Book of Strange New Things. So, I was (and still am) immersed in religion, but this is really more of a book about publishing and the book industry.
Books used to be significant things. The Bible didn't start off competing with crime fiction and didn't get liked on the internet but was a compendium of everything that was considered worth saying at the time. It didn't have a genre, or an author. God didn't promote it on book tours. The idea of a book being holy is almost anachronistic. A book is a commercial property now and in some ways, so are our lives.
Theo's girlfriend trades up for a better product while he is off in the birthplace of civilization turned war zone. In the midst of life and death Theo and the rest of us are preoccupied with trivia. The early Christians may have shared some of our superficiality but, perhaps because they were less insulated from their physicality, weren't rendering everything unto Caesar. Spiritual concerns also had a place in their lives. It is this tension between the unimportant and the Absolute that this book is about.
Theo's historical find serves mainly to undermine meaning from (some) people's lives. He begins to suspect this when he is threatened with a gun at a promotional event, but it's not until he is kidnapped with a strong likelihood he will be killed that the non-trivial finally gets his attention, but even that transformation doesn't happen easily. Most of his thoughts while a captive are petty and the sound track of his captivity is television.
In the end, though possibly mortally wounded, he gives up his selfish concerns. He is grateful to the guy who saved his life. He wanders through the "bad neighborhood" without feeling superior to it. He has experienced a sort of religious conversion.
The epilogue sums it up in the words of the fifth gospel--that we try and talk about things for which we lack the words which is like trying to capture a moonbeam in our pocket. We are immersed in trivia and can't escape it though the threat of death can momentarily awaken us.
