THE FIRE GOSPEL - Michel Faber - Fiction

I was introduced to Michel Faber through his opus THE CRIMSON PETAL AND THE WHITE (about Victorian-era prostitutes, not, as the title might suggest, racial segregation at Harvard.) Since reading and loving that novel, everything else he writes seems fairly tossed off, especially the more modern pieces. Unless you're David Foster Wallace, a 700+ page book is never going to be followed by something better. Now, FIRE GOSPEL isn't really supposed to be anything more than a trifle. It's Faber's contribution to something called the Myths series, famous contemporary authors reworking a myth in their own styles. Faber's is, I guess, the myth of an additional gospel--adding to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John--but I had never heard of this particular "myth," so to me the story seemed rather inventive, which can only have made it better. (To get a sense of my background, or lack thereof, I had to google the names of the original gospels, and I had thought that Isaac was one of them.) The plot draws parallels to Dan Brown's work, but the Aramaic scholar protagonist, Theo, is firmly in Paul Giamatti territory. The thing is, everyone else is, too--the men who kidnap him turn out to be gay and more than a bit confused about the actual purpose of the kidnapping, and the female foils are an unsympathetic girlfriend who dumps Theo when he returns from a close call at a museum in Iraq, and an unscrupulous literary agent who takes the customer satisfaction of her publishing company's biggest star very seriously.

This--let's call it a novella--took about 45 minutes to read, and not quite as long to anticipate, even with its ambiguous ending. Money can't buy you love, religion makes people angry no matter what the message, and instant satisfaction isn't a road to fulfillment. But reading THE CRIMSON PETAL AND THE WHITE is, coincidentally.