Innocent people must drown in Lake Galilee. Indeed, Beard is brutally balanced in his approach, reminding us that in John 11:6, Jesus remained at a distance from Lazarus as his death approached, all the better to ensure an unignorable death and a memorable miracle. Lazarus thinks back to his childhood friendship with Jesus: “as children in small-town Nazareth, the boys could barely be told apart.” Lazarus returns again and again to a pivotal event in their childhood with another friend, Amos, in which Jesus does not come out well and which is decisive in parting the young friends. He turns to a healer, Yanav, who “likes sick people with active imaginations who thrive on close attention,” and whose treatments unsurprisingly fail to help. “His life is ordered, successful, unusual he doesn’t need enlightenment.” He attempts to carry on with life and work through a worrying decline in health each time Jesus performs a miracle, his condition deteriorates. In Beard’s story, Lazarus is a businessman. Front of stage in his own book, Lazarus here becomes a man in full. The only gospel which mentions Lazarus is John, and for a man who is Jesus’ “only recorded friend”, his story is short. It is both respectful to the biblical scriptures, and more observant than they are to Lazarus’s own story. It is a novel, a biography, and a study in fiction and storytelling. Lazarus is Dead is described on the jacket as “genre-bending,” though blending might be more apt. Perhaps a contemporary allegory? In fact, such category issues are central to the book. (I had better add, in case anyone suspects slippery phrasing, that this is that book.) I’m not sure what I thought Lazarus is Dead would be: not quite a ‘religious spoof’ as the Edinburgh Book Festival crassly categorised it. Occasionally you read a novel which entirely subverts your expectations and, in doing so, becomes one of your favourites of the year.
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