The Book of the People

April 11, 2016
Wilson (Victoria: A Life), a convert from atheism to Christianity, weaves together meditations on the Bible with personal anecdotes in “an attempt to persuade people to read the Bible.” Throughout this journey, he stays in a decades-long conversation with a woman he calls L, who dies before the book is complete. Wilson reveals a privileged existence: while in Israel filming a documentary about the Bible, he rejects the validity of the quest for the historical Jesus, and he learns to appreciate Job through hearing Northrop Frye’s Oxford lectures on William Blake. Wilson comes to accept the Bible as based on reality—to him, Jesus is not merely a literary construct. Yet for him, the power of the Bible emerges most completely from its imaginative potential. Wilson soars in describing how we can find this imaginative Bible through George Herbert’s poetry or the work of Simone Weil or Martin Luther King Jr., or in the Hagia Sophia or a Eucharist service. Those who enjoyed Brock and Parker’s Saving Paradise will likely take pleasure in this similarly positive take on viewing the Bible through the lens of the arts.

June 1, 2016

Recognizing the Bible's great influence on literature and culture generally, prolific fiction and nonfiction author Wilson (fellow, Royal Soc. of Literature; Victoria: A Life) offers a reflection on the text's impact on his own life as well as the various ways in which people have "read" the Bible, including Michelangelo's depiction on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and the actions of Martin Luther King Jr. during the civil rights movement. Wilson rejects the fundamentalism of believers and atheists alike, saying that both groups misread the scriptures and thus fail to appreciate their richness. Dismissing the search for the historical Jesus, which Wilson at one time engaged in, the author concentrates on the words of the Bible itself, arguing that the content must be consumed imaginatively. His ideas are in the tradition of Robert Alter (The Five Books of Moses) and Frank Kermode's (coauthor with Alter, The Literary Guide to the Bible), who view the books of the Bible as great storytelling while respecting their religious elements. VERDICT The book will appeal to readers who have an ambiguous relationship with the Bible and those who appreciate the scriptures as literature.--Augustine J. Curley, Newark Abbey, NJ

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2016
Why and how to read the Bible in modern times.Wilson (Victoria: A Life, 2014, etc.) looks back on a lifetime spent despising religion only to realize that the Bible itself has some place in human society. He uses as his vehicle a clunky, quasi-fiction/quasi-memoir format in which he re-examines Christian Scripture through various lenses. Along the way, he is led by a slightly older and certainly more mature counterpart, a woman identified only as "L." Through occasional chance meetings at museums, conversations over coffee, and periodic letters, L. opens Wilson's mind to see the Bible in a richer light. The author even states that his book is in fact a book that L. had hoped to write but never completed. In the course of this story, Wilson learns to "read" the Bible not as a text to be argued over in terms of historicity and other elements but as a voice of the divine for, and by, the mass of people in any given age or place. For instance, Martin Luther King Jr., "read" the Bible properly by not arguing over the facts of the Exodus but by inspiring African-Americans through that story of freedom. William Blake "read" the book of Job correctly by seeing in it a man who must turn from rule-following to spiritual awakening in order to be redeemed. Wilson finds that for oppressed peoples, especially, the Bible is a source of empowerment. "Those who regard religion as mental poison blind themselves to the forcefulness of religion as a power for good against monstrous injustices," he writes. Wilson comes off as pompous and arrogant at times, flaunting his intellect and his literary connections--e.g., when he describes awaking early to read Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in Istanbul. As for his conclusions, they are positive but vague. A lackluster offering from a literary giant.

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