Anne Rice’s “Christ the Lord” looks like something of a departure for the author of “Interview with the Vampire.” After growing up Catholic, Rice became an atheist in college, wrote a number of successful novels, and then in 1998 returned to the Catholic church. And the two (so far) novels in her “Christ the Lord” series, “Out of Egypt” and “The Road to Cana,” are the result of a religious experience. This change of direction attracted attention from her fans and from the media, and she wrote an essay on her earlier works to make the case that her first-person narration of the life of Jesus has more continuity with her vampire stories than it might seem.
“Out of Egypt” is a good and enjoyable story. It’s an ambitious undertaking: have the adult Jesus tell the story of his childhood; engage the reader with an original story and characters; keep it all faithful to the gospels. As she says in the Author’s Note at the end, “Anybody could write about a liberal Jesus, a married Jesus, a gay Jesus, a Jesus who was a rebel. The true challenge was…to take the Jesus of the Gospels, and try to get inside him and imagine what he felt.” She manages to write about the Jesus who is fully human and fully divine.
The first person narration is a bit jarring at first. This is not, after all, the Bible. Putting words in Jesus’ mouth might seem the height of impiety. But you can go as wrong by denying Jesus’ humanity as by denying his divinity. Jesus was born into a human family and grew up as a human child, and it’s not unreasonable to explore what that might imply. Still, if you’re not in the market for a historical novel about Jesus, the Author’s Note at the end is worth reading. There’s some autobiography, an unsparing examination of contemporary New Testament scholarship, and some useful bibliographic material. I look forward to reading Rice’s sequel, “The Road to Cana.”
