About.com Rating



Bloomsbury, 2008

The title character of John: A Novel appears in many different roles in the Bible. He is often called "John of Patmos" because he was exiled by the Romans to the island of Patmos. He is John of the Revelation, that puzzling book that fortells the end times with scenes of angels, the seven seals, and the four horsemen of the apocalypse. According to tradition, John is both Jesus's friend and apostle and the same John who wrote the gospel.

He is a fascinating figure—and yet, in the Bible, we meet him only briefly.

Luckily, Niall Williams has taken on the challenge of bringing John to life. It's our fortune that, as he sat working on another book, a question popped into his mind: "What was John doing the day before he wrote the gospel?" In this lovely book, full of elegant descriptions of the world and people's emotions, Williams shows us the power of love and of belief.

When we meet John of Patmos, he is a very old man. He has long been blind and relies on the care of his followers. He leads a group of nearly thirty men, all of whom wait for the second coming of Christ. John has known Jesus in person — he and his brother James gave up a comfortable life to follow Jesus and listen to his teachings. After the resurrection, John traveled widely, teaching the gospel. Then he and a group of Christians were exiled to Patmos by the Romans. Their life on the island is simple; they are taught by John, they pray, and they wait.

The first half of the book builds slowly.

Some troubling events unfold — the young man who acts as John's personal aide, Papias, goes to pray with one of the local women and is confronted with evil personified. The Christians are exposed to illness and death in their little community. And one of John's disciples, Matthias, turns away from Jesus's teachings to lead his own religious movement. Book II begins just after the Roman emperor has, on his deathbed, ordered the persecution and banishment of Christians to cease. John and his followers leave for the mainland to begin teaching the world about Jesus. They struggle with hostility, indifference, and even Matthias's treachery. They do find a few people who are moved by their preaching and join them in Eucharist.

At first, John felt slow and laborious. A modern reader, used to snappy dialogue and breathtaking action, may have to consciously slow down to appreciate the pace of the story, much of which is internal. We get to know John intimately through his aches and pains: "The old man is thin and vulnerable to the wind. His legs are not steady. He is a frail assembly of bones." We learn his understanding of the gospel: "My children, love not in world, neither in tongue, but in deed and in truth. Love, this is the commandment we have. Love." Sometimes the language is unfortunately melodramatic: "Seabirds unsheltered try to go beyond the storm but are blown backwards in darkness like the souls of the undeserving from the near bounds of heaven." But when I reached the end of the book, I realized that I had become deeply invested in John and the other followers of Jesus. The Bible stories and characters had become real, partly because the pace and language of the book was so well suited to getting to know someone intimately. In the end, I found that John had tempered my initial impatience and that I had really enjoyed it.