When the saints go marching in again
Caroline Moore
LIVE FROM GOLGOTHA by Gore Vidal Deutsch, £14.99, pp. 232 Live from Golgotha is like an amalgam of Life of Brian with Star Trek — one of those lime-warp' episodes when characters keep bumping into their past and future selves, and their mission (usually to save the Universe, or prevent History from being rewritten) keeps getting bogged down by the scriptwriters' need to decide and explain quite what physical and tempo- ral laws govern this week's instalment. Gore Vidal's novel is part blasphemously comic rewrite of the Acts of the Apostles, part frenetic science-fiction, complete with 'tele-time transportation' and its full quota of bemused questioning ('Why didn't you stop your younger self the same way that you stopped him from trying to peddle that false gospel to me?' There's no answer to that one.) And our hero, Timothy, one of the saints who 'started out on the ground floor' by becoming social secretary, gofer and lay to St Paul, has the usual task: to preserve History (and in this case Christianity) As We Know It, and to prevent the destruction of the world by nuclear holocaust in the year 2001. These rather tired and tacky elements are given surprising comic energy by Vidal. Surprising, because this remains essentially a one joke book: the depiction of saints with large and active dicks, dongs, whangs, weenies etc ('He had fantastic double standards, but then most saints do', `Basically, Priscilla was just a horny gal'), whose church is an on-going show-biz concern, grossing massive box-office receipts, due to the fantastic fund-raising and marketing skills of St Paul, with his brilliant new logo, the cross, and his reali- sation of the importance of the Follow-11P Letter. 'Book-keeping wise, you got one sweet operation going', as the second high priestess of Diana of Ephesus tells Timo- thy, in bed, naturally. Such writing is altogether too easy for Vidal, and it shows. In that silent smoky hall you could have fhoeraerskidan slide back ..d.pin drop or the loosest Now there's a glissando oddly missing from the BBC sound archives.
This looks pretty puerile; but in pytho esque fashion, the sheer exuberance of the joke's ramifications proves irresistible.
Certainly Saint was in great form. He was now writing circular letters to our churches, epistles chock-full of recipes, jokes, hints on good grooming and interior decoration and, naturally, horoscopes.
Or again:
Like all normal Asia Minor boys I was curious about the hygiene of your average high priestess of Diana . . . Fascinated, listened as she talked minor-high-priestess talk by the yard, including such forbidden subjects as clitoral circumcision, depilatories, and of course, inevitably, accident insurance and liability.
If you don't find these extracts at all funny, don't buy the book.
St Timothy's richly anachronistic prose- style (`Saint could sell a refrigerator to an Eskimo') is part of his unreliability as a narrator. His problem is that scientists, TV executives, Zionists, assorted religious lunatics and Shirley McLaine keep 'chan- nelling in' to his life from the future, where time travel is being perfected through a mish-mash of trances and technology. This vastly complicates the middle-aged Timo- thy's mission, which is nothing less than to save Christianity. As St Paul posthumously reveals to Timothy, via a relatively old- fashioned vision, an evil computer-genius Will or has introduced a virus into the memory banks of every computer on earth. The Greatest Story Ever Told is rapidly being untold, garbled with blasphemies or dissolving in cascades from every screen. Only the Gospel according to Timothy will survive, because it has not yet been discov- ered in the mop-room of his cathedral, and so can be fed directly into a hacker-proof Programme. But Timothy hasn't yet written it, and as he struggles to recall his early life on the road with 'Saint', it seems that the hackers have found some way to alter, erase and garble his memories. Will the Gospel according to Timothy be such as to inspire the faith of future generations? What odd compulsion makes him confess to date-rape by Nero? Did Jesus really h. ave a gross gladular weight problem? And if so, will he have a serious image-problem When NBC finally has the technology to transmit the Crucifixion live from Golgotha, with Timothy as anchorperson (`I thanked both the Roman administration and the Temple staff for their kind co- operation. I also did a short commercial for the Company that had provided the user- friendly nails for the crucifix')? Jesting Pilate's query underlies this kro.na. p. There are serious questions of relia- ullaY, authenticity, transmission and the role of memory in creating personality and history bundled up here. I do not actually think that the book would have been better and funnier if it had played more ostenta- tiously with these themes: probably only 'ens write and enjoy the self-conscious genre that they like to term 'ludic'. What we have here is more entertaining, and silly: it reads more like the extended skit of an extremely clever undergraduate.
Previous page
