Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal (2002)

Divertente - e anche plausibile, in fondo potrebbe essere andata così.
Secondo me alcuni capitoli potevano essere alleggeriti per evitare di essere un po' ripetitivi, complessivamente è comunque una lettura molto piacevole. ( )

Once I shut up my inner Catholic, I really loved this book. Not only was it irreverent and funny, but really thought provoking. Great exploration into the idea of what would happen if you woke up and found out your best friend really was the messiah. Moreover, how does a young man deal psychologically with the responsibility of being the savior of the world. ( )

I had some issues with this book, namely the "bed trick" pulled on Mary. A "bed trick," in other words, is a rape. This event, and the conversation had before it, made it difficult for me to like either Biff or Joshua moving forward. However, most of my friends who read this book didn't have the same reaction, so I'll try to put that aside to review this. (Still, I can't recommend it, and anyone sensitive to this type of scene really should avoid it.)

This book is one of those where you find yourself thinking that the author could have done so much better with what he or she had, with just a little more thought and effort.

This is a neat premise, and taking it on in with a thoroughly modern sensibility and tongue-in-cheek humor is a great way to go. But it turned out to be "almost" funny and "almost" heretical without fully committing to either.

I really liked Biff's one-liners; his dialogue was always catty and on-point. I laughed a few times. But the narrative never got there. He often made gimme jokes that just didn't measure up to his dialogue. One example that stuck in my head was when Biff discussed never being able to live up to Jesus's example of forgiveness. He says something like, "It was the only thing I could never understand. Well, that and geometry!" It's the standard joke cliche -- "Math is hard, amirite?" It's a gimme. You could have really done something funny with that, but instead you went with a cliche.

There were things that really were hilarious -- Raziel's obsession with soap operas and inability to realize they aren't real -- but most of the stuff just wasn't quite there.

It's the same thing with the retelling of Jesus's early life. (Aside: Does it count as a retelling when the Bible doesn't talk about his early years at all?) Christopher Moore clearly wanted to take a heretical track in order to make it comedic, which you really have to do, given the subject matter. If you take on this area of history for your novel, you are going to get complaints no matter what you do. (The Red Tent gets banning proposals from evangelical Christians all the time, and its only heresy seems to be implying that women have thoughts and feelings independent of their husbands.) So, in my opinion, you really have to go for it. You have to pull a Mark Twain here. Give those people something to be offended about! Give us some rollicking good blasphemy!

But it doesn't quite get there. Moore humanizes Jesus -- he likes bacon! he's disappointed he can't have sex! -- but everything the Bible says still goes. There's little of the "how it really happened" that could have shed some light on Jesus (and been funny). There's really quite little resembling blasphemy in practice -- it's all in the premise. Clearly Moore comes down on the side of the Christian faith, which is totally fine with me, but if you claim to write something irreverent, there's so much more you can do. There's a huge amount of ground between taking the New Testament down and doing something original and irreverent that really hits it on the head.

I suppose if I were offering advice to someone trying to recreate this type of novel, I'd have three main suggestions: more religious irreverence, more complex comedy, and more consent. Much more. ( )

All I can coherently conjure in my head, right now, is this humourous novel is a biblical bromance. Clearly I need to work on a proper review. ( )

In theory the idea of following Jesus aka Joshua during his early years through the lens of his best friend Biff should lead to some wacky and funny moments. Particularly if Biff is clueless and more than a little juvenile.

And it did at times. The explanations around bunnies at Easter and how turning the other cheek originated were great. However, the middle dragged and I become very annoyed with Biff. Some funny is good but when everything a character has to say is a sarcastic remark, tied to sex or profanity, it feels one dimensional. I give Moore props though for taking a really, really tough subject and wringing humor out of it. Somehow I think I would like him in person; he strikes me as open-minded, tolerant and unique. I may try some of his other books just to see if there is a connection. ( )