![]() ![]() ![]() In contrast, we are currently seeing a singular depiction of maternal rage and grief played out on our screens by the actress Jodie Whittaker in the BBC drama “ Broadchurch.” As the mother of a murdered 11-year-old boy, Whittaker is the personification of unsettled pain, despairingly lost in dark thoughts one moment, lashing our with venom and anger the next. To their point of view, the “real” Mary would have appeared not unlike a Renaissance madonna: enigmatic and mute. Tóibín has at least restored her voice. However, how realistic is the book, really? Tóibín’s Mary still behaves like an icon, and appears at times indistinguishable from a painting, sitting in her room barely listening to the eager scribes consciously rewriting history through their gospels. Fifty years ago half the country would have had a coronary at any attempt at a realistic, iconoclastic portrayal. I suppose it’s a measure of how times have changed that there aren’t charges of blasphemy and calls for the book to be banned. Perhaps things would have been better served by providing her with a foil, or an interrogator of some kind? ![]() Tóibín is backing a losing horse from the first word as his narrative is unavoidably one-sided, and captures Mary’s voice and judgement at the end of her life, when sunk in hopeless despair and grief. ![]() However, his short stories are well-plotted, and the characters’ interaction provides the spark and color readers crave, so this story would have been jarringly out of place. It’s a disappointment after Tóibín’s masterful short-story collection Mothers and Sons, into which this novella would have fit thematically. While this revisionist portrayal of Mary as an angry, grieving mother, full of believable despair and rage at the cruel fate of her son, and anger at the inadequacy of his followers and their craven attempt to recast his life into something it was not through their gospels, is a welcome and overdue antidote to centuries of empty religious iconography, it’s an inconsistent portrait. The Testament of Mary promises much, but delivers less than hoped. Colm Tóibín’s novel The Testament of Mary has not only been transformed into a Broadway play, but it’s been short-listed for the 2013 Booker Prize as well. ![]()
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