WORDS: ROSIE O’DOWD

Colm Tóibín’s latest offering, The Testament of Mary, shortlisted for the prestigious Man Booker Prize, tells a quiet tale and sweeps behind the scenes of myth and memory to recover a single voice, a recovery of truth. The protagonist at the heart of this story is Mary, a name significant across many traditions, almost synonymous with Mother, who traces the dust-tracks of memory to unearth what is real; how her boy “became a man and left home and became a dying figure hanging on a cross.”

The novel, at 30,000 words across 104 pages, has become the slimmest work to be shortlisted for the Booker, with the Chair of this year’s judging panel, Robert Macfarlane, claiming to be “drawn to novels that sought to extend the possibilities of the form.” And it is our familiarity with this story that makes for its strangeness — a little book that questions the big book of faith and long-standing tradition.

Moving “quietly within the four walls” of her house in Ephesus in the aftermath of the crucifixion, a mother mourns the loss of her unnamed son, recounting her impossible experience to the two men who come to collect her words as a record of this unhappy time which they wish to celebrate in their writings. In a stark and often cynical voice, we hear a woman rise against the words that are being fed to her by men, and in the so-called “ambiguous light,” tell a truth observed “in the doorway, in the shadows where no one noticed me.” Her recollections of the “misfits” her son brought to her table, the hucksters, salesmen, water-carriers, fire-eaters and purveyors of cheap food, whose willingness to follow in a time of turmoil and change made a man “filled with power.” She is remorseless in her reading of power, patriarchy and human politics as she deciphers the nature of the events in which a man had been made to die “spayed out against the sky on a hill so the world would know and see and remember.”

Yet it is our memory that Mary refutes, our assertions she questions, the world of men and the world of power she de-robes. The starkness and precision of Tóibín’s narrative gives rise to a strong voice whose “woman’s notion” speaks out against the men shouting in the night. Tóibín masterfully sheds light on a deeply flawed humanity, a crowd of misfits in and of itself.

Tóibín’s Mary is indeed no madwoman in the attic, and it is the scope of this novel in the realms of the interior that best qualify it to open up the form, bringing one back to the small room in which memories in exile roam freely.

The Testament of Mary (Viking)  is now available in bookshops (€11.50).