FICTION: JohnBy Niall WilliamsBloomsbury, pp280, £16.99
THIS IS A disconcerting read. There are caveats. Firstly, that portion of blurb offered on the front cover: "Williams's prose is bathed in poetry and moonlight" does the author no service, suggesting a vague poeticising and a mixture of the real and the romanticised. Secondly, one should begin by reading the author's note at the end of the book.
The main problem is that a general consensus of those who read the New Testament with serious intent accept that the John of the Fourth Gospel, the John of the Epistles and the John of the Book of Revelation are not one and the same person. For the purposes of this book, a "fiction", Niall Williams writes: "As a novelist, I write not to tell what I think, but to find out what I feel. I began imagining a man." That is all very fine but to the reader who is aware of the John difficulties, the assumption underlying the novel that there is but one John, disturbs.
Then there is that blurb, and its occasional accuracy surfacing in the prose of this fiction: such phrases as "a broken urn of expectation between them" raise that hammerheaded awkwardness of rhetorical flourishing, and that is continued too often in heightened prose that urges a response of heightened sensibility but that fails to achieve that response. There is much awkwardness, shards of that same rhetoric, "the fanfare makes stop the square entire"; "let who would come, to come". Such peculiarities in the prose disturb and distract.
The author's note explains: "This is a novel, not history nor biography. I hope it offers the rewards of a novel in depicting the inner life of a man of faith and doubt, and, most important, perhaps, what it might be to love for a lifetime." We are back, in the last phrase, to the strengths of Williams's work, the study of love and its necessary fidelities. John is about 100 years old, exiled with followers on the island of Patmos, a bleak and unrewarding spot. They await the second coming of Christ but there are growing tensions among them as time passes and Christ does not return.
"Their faith holds them, but they look to the old man in their centre as to a mystery." Gradually two factions grow among them, one led by Matthias who manipulates a "miracle" and leads a group back to the mainland. A handful remain, including Papias, the youngest, who is a well-drawn character, full of emotional faith and urgent longings. "The ascending columns of their prayers thinning at the base," they are eventually taken out of exile and Williams succeeds well in contrasting the familiarity of the demanding rock of an island with the alien and demanding city of Ephesus where they hope to bring the Word to the people.
Throughout the story, as Williams imagines it, John is seen as remembering his time with Jesus (and here we must waver, in our doubts) and too much space is given over to the exact words as they are spoken in the New Testament. In places, too, for the purposes of narrative, there is a little too much self-conscious manipulation of details, particularly in the use the novelist makes of a plague that attacks the small group of the faithful.
WILLIAMS DOES WELL IN MAINTAINING and drawing together the many strands of his peculiar narrative and, in the overt purposes of the novel, the study of faithful love and its demands, this is gripping and believable. The book is also finely drawn together by the metaphorical use of light and darkness (the blind Apostle, the blind unbelievers, the darkness surrounding earthquake, the light of faith), of the stability of rock and the fluidity of the ocean, the faithfulness of John to the words of Jesus. A paragraph may offer a good example of the prose techniques of the book: "There are curious seabirds overhead. They watch for fragments of bread, foodstuffs, fish, and cry raucous as though in torment. The sea tumbles. Sky burdened with cloud releases no light. The island seems evermore a prison." The metaphorical liens of the story hold here, as does the sometimes strange prose, the heightening effects and the tendency to over-write.
Allowing for all of these misgivings, the book remains a brave one, the times we live in not being welcoming to any suggestion of transcendence: as one of John's followers admits: "I am sad to confess, the world hates us still."
This is a work of fiction and it would be wrong to ask more of it; it must be enough to accept it as a study of a faith sustained through impossible difficulties and the demands of an un-withholding love.
In an age where reason and science have shown themselves inadequate to fulfil the human dream of perfection, it is important that serious writers such as Williams face the perennial questions of faith and love.
• John F Deane is a poet. His new collection A Little Book of Hours has just been published by Carcanet. Columba Press has also recently published his essays, From the Marrow-bone: The Poetry of Religion, the Religion of Poetry