The Liars' Gospel by Naomi Alderman – review

Four alternative perspectives on the Christian Messiah provide a visceral account of Jewish life under the Romans
Giotto’s Kiss of Judas (1304-06).
Giotto’s Kiss of Judas (1304-06). Photograph: Giotto Di Bondone/Getty/The Bridgeman Art Library

The most famous story in the western world is told in four separate, overlapping versions. In places they corroborate one another; elsewhere they diverge, or throw new light on the same incidents by offering a different perspective. Yet for centuries, all four accounts have been accepted as gospel.

Naomi Alderman's third novel offers four more accounts of the execution of the itinerant first-century teacher Yehoshuah of Natzaret, from the perspective of four characters who didn't get to tell their side in the original. There is Miryam, his mother; Iehudah of Qeriot, his former friend and the man who betrayed him; Caiaphas, high priest of the temple in Jerusalem, and Bar-Avo, a rebel leader who is saved by popular vote, while Yehoshuah is condemned to death. As an epigraph she takes Auden's lines from Musée des Beaux Arts on Brueghel's Icarus; the ploughman turning away from "the splash, the forsaken cry" because "for him it was not an important failure". So, in these accounts, the crucifixion takes place off-stage, without any of the significance later attributed to it. If the death of Yehoshuah has any meaning in this novel, it is only on a personal level: the death of a son, of a friend, the death of one more Jewish man who had the courage to face up to the occupying forces on behalf of his people, but who ultimately lacked the cunning to save himself.

The Liars' Gospel is unmistakably a novel of Jewish history, inspired as much by Josephus as the biblical narratives. In all four stories, Alderman effectively creates a climate of fear; this is a world in which every Jew lives glancing over his shoulder, where the women censor their talk in the market for fear of being overheard, where young men simmer and stew in disenfranchised resentment until their anger explodes in ill-judged riots against the Roman soldiers who are ever-present on every street. Here, faithfully and dutifully going through the daily rituals of their religion is a small act of defiance for the occupied people. Yehoshuah – who, like all the characters, is only ever referred to by his Jewish name – is a product of this culture. Travelling preachers are commonplace; oppressed people flock to anyone who will promise them a better world than this one. When their followers become sufficient to disturb the peace, Rome begins to take notice. In this, Yehoshuah of Natzaret is not unique.

Yet Alderman has no axe to grind here; there is no sense in which this is a Jewish author attempting to debunk the Christian story. She skirts around the question of Jesus's miracles (though Judas, in his narrative, meets a Roman sceptic who shows him how certain "healers" tricks are effected) and his sanity. Even the matter of the resurrection is left open; Miryam sends her other sons to retrieve the body, only to find the tomb already empty. Yehoshuah's followers do the same. Each assumes the others must have taken it, but no resolution is offered. Alderman's concern here is with the human cost of such a movement in its wider context, and with the way stories grow retrospectively around a complex and controversial figure, whose own words often seemed so deliberately ambiguous.

The novel opens with a description of the daily blood sacrifice made by the priests in the temple, a ritual which echoes through the book as metaphor. The spilling of blood in this book is both sacred and casual, as essential to devotion as it is to freedom or the notion of justice – though for the Romans, it is often no more than a sport. Alderman writes in tough, visceral prose; this is a world of blood and dust, sweat, sex and violence. The dark wit that characterised her previous novels, Disobedience and The Lessons, runs through this book as an undercurrent, but The Liars' Gospel shows the hand of a mature novelist, a daring and accomplished work on a broad canvas. She is as much at home describing the sorrow of a mother as the cut and thrust of theological debate, as convincing on the weariness and self-doubt of a man forced by politics into moral compromise as the rush of blood in a teenage boy caught up in his first riot. She paints the sweep of history through the sharp pain of human love and loss, and it is a remarkable achievement.

Miryam recalls visiting Jerusalem with her father as a child, walking the road out of the city between rows of what she thought of as "screaming trees": thousands of Jewish men crucified along the roadside as a lesson in obedience to Rome. In an oblique way, it is these men that the novel honours most of all, in reminding us that, though history has chosen to remember one Jewish man's death on a cross, he was far from the only blood sacrifice of his time.