Anne Rice’s The Road To Cana
Anne Rice’s second installment in her series Christ the Lord is out. It covers the period before Jesus’ baptism, when he is dealing with the efforts of his family to get him to marry and settle down, to the miracle at Cana. Already, the reviews are appearing, for example at the blog site Challies Dot Com, which is critical of some of the book’s theology. Though the review is closely reasoned, I am reminded of my reaction to similar criticisms of my own novel — “I look forward to reading your Jesus novel to see how you handle the passage.” Which is not to say that either my story or Anne Rice’s is free from error — or that my pastor’s sermon last Sunday was free from error. We do the best we can, and in each attempt our vision seems a little clearer.
What interested me about The Road to Cana was its first-person point of view, Jesus’ own. She did this is her first Jesus novel, but in Out of Egypt, Jesus in only seven, and it seems not quite so presumptious. I only occasionally gave Jesus some interior monologue (for example, at the beginning of Chapter 8), and I ended up editing and re-editing those scenes.
Anne Rice is good at presenting scenes dramatically — unlike Norman Mailer in his first-person Gospel According to the Son — and has some striking imagery. For example, when Satan appears to tempt Jesus in the wilderness, he looks just like Jesus himself, only much better dressed. The novel is thought-provoking and engaging — and not for everyone.