The Gospel of Judas

I came back to this Simon Mawer novel now because I liked The Glass Room so much and because it seemed like a good segue from The Essene Conspiracy. Aside from the quantum leap in quality of the writing, this is a completely different kind of book. While it has a papyrus from a Qmran type source that offers a radically different version of Christ's life and the founding of the church, like Wachtel's book, like Da Vinci Code and its numerous imitators, this is not a thriller.

It is a novel about a priest's loss of faith, a complex drama in which the discovery of a putative "Gospel of Judas" plays a decidedly minor role and only really in the last third of the book. The story of Father Leo Newman, a British papyrologist who lives in Rome, has as much in common with Bernanos' Diary of a Country Priest and J.F. Powers' Morte d'Urban as it does with the garden variety biblical thriller.

Mawer in fact has such an understanding of the celibate's mind, the emotional stunting that accompanies the vow of chastity, the fragile foundation in faith for this type of dedication, that I checked his biography to see if he actually was in the seminary. If he was, his bio gives no indication of it, so perhaps he has simply gotten to know a number of priests well in his 30 years of living in Rome. In any case, I know from my own experience as a Jesuit novice and seminarian that he describes those feelings with agonizing accuracy.

Less surprising is how Mawer can make Rome palpable with a few deft strokes. These are not elaborate descriptions but telling details that betray an intimacy with the sights, sounds and smells of the Eternal City. I've only spent a smattering of weeks in Rome, but the city came rushing back into my memory in Mawer's narrative.

There is more to say about the plot but it is again the language that for me is in the forefront. It is a muscular prose, as vivid in its description of the tangible as the intangible. It is a sophisticated, sinuous narrative that has room for Latin, Italian, Greek, German seamlessly embedded in the text. In my research about the author, I came across this statement from an interview he gave:

"To write decent novels you have to be in love with the language. You have to feel the texture of it between your fingers, mould it like clay, carve it like marble. Despite all the creative writing programs in the world, I am sure this ability cannot be taught. So I try to use the meanings of words, of place names, of personal names, to inform the narrative."

This is exactly what comes across. In this book, just for instance, Mawer uses the redolent names of Rome's churches to convey the grandeur, the historicity, the plasticity, even, of these monuments -- Santa Maria Maggiore, San Crisogono, Santa Maria dell'Anima, San Lorenzo fuori le mura. His descriptions of the picnics and outings that his mother, the wife of the German ambassador to Italy, made in wartime Rome evoke the splendid ruin of Italy's past. Such pursuit of civilized leisure even as the Axis war machine rains terror on the rest of Europe is reminiscent of Visconti's "The Damned."

Mawer the writer does not seem to have much use for fidelity in marriage. Perhaps there's too little drama in that and it's only the adulterous affair that merits a novel. Leo's mother, the wife of the German ambassador, and Leo's lover, the wife of the British ambassador (no subalterns here) conduct curiously parallel affairs in Rome. Their husbands are similarly cold and detached, the implication being that this is the type of personality that becomes a successful diplomat. The women characters are so much more vibrant, despite their frailty or instability or moral flaws.

Judas Iscariot, the apostle, is the author of the gospel that Leo comes to believe is genuine. But the novel is full of other Judases. Leo's mother betrays her lover in a way that can know no forgiveness (except from the betrayed), and Leo himself earns the title of Judas for turning his back on his priesthood and the 2,000-year history of Christianity.

The details of the gospel are interesting, how it transforms the narrative of Jesus' life simply by shifting a couple of small facts. Whether genuine or forgery, whether a truthful account or deliberate misinformation, the gospel of Judas has little chance of challenging the centuries-old Christian faith. History has too much invested in the received tradition to accept any other truth, even if factual. Yes, the gospel has information that could shake Christianity to its foundations, but it can never earn the credence that would allow this to happen.

Just where the author stands in all this become clear in his account of Leo's "pilgrimage" at the end of the book, which explains why the church will remain triumphant and why it's futile to seek the truth.

Faith has no object to begin with, so it cannot be exposed. As Leo's lover Madeleine tells him when he finally accepts the inevitable about their relationship: "Poor poor Leo, learning at last the only lesson life has to give." "What's that?" [Leo asks]. "That there is nothing else. that there is only you and me, now, at this moment and this place. All else is no more than empty hope."

Just a few pages later, when Madeleine asks Leo if he still believes after the discovery of the gospel, Leo tries to say that belief doesn't just "evaporate."

Madeleine responds: "Doesn't it? That's exactly what it seems to do in my experience. Evaporate, like a lake or something drying up, leaving nothing behind but mudflats and a few dirty puddles and a musty smell of superstition."

Mawer clearly doesn't set out to write bestsellers. This is anything but a potboiler, though it is a compelling read and has its own suspense. Nor will his willingness to mock Christianity and make an apostate priest his hero endear him to legions of believers. But the reader doesn't have to identify with Leo. The reader can see him as a flawed, in some ways tragic individual. The Gospel of Judas is a question, not an answer, and the reader can decide where the truth lies.

The Glass Room

Simon Mawer's beautifully written novel is subtle and entertaining, and in some respects is a minor masterpiece. Intertwining the modernist house with the lives of the characters creates a metaphor that succeeds in working on many levels.

It is a novel of ideas, yes, and takes place against a fascinating historical backdrop of Hitler's invasion of Czechoslovakia, but is above all a drama involving the Landauers, their house, their family and their fate. Even when the family leaves the stage and the focus remains on the house, they are present on almost every page. The narrative is framed by the return of Liesel Landauer to the house, so the connection remains intact.


Hana is the one main character whose point of view is never taken. She in fact reflects the house. She is always there, appearing in the house in every occupation, absorbing it and loving its various inhabitants much as the house would itself if it were a sentient being.

There is a lovely irony throughout the book. The biometric laboratory that occupies the house during the war is shut down because the scientists cannot find a way to measure the physical differences between the Nordic races and Jews. Liesel apologizes for being so casual in relating Viktor's fate, but the author is equally casual in creating an ironic end for a builder of automobiles from a landlocked country.

But it is the shades of love that captivate the reader -- between Viktor and Liesel, between Viktor and Kata, between Liesel and Hana, between Liesel and Rainer, between Hana and Werner, between Tomas and Zdenka, between Zdenka and Hana. Mawer limns each of these relationships beautifully, making even the cad-like behavior of the men sympathetic. The scene where Liesel and Kata confront each other over their relationships with Viktor, sitting by the lake in exile in Zurich, is sensitive and delicate. Liesel struggles with her ambivalence, swallows her pride and accepts Kata's role in their family life. The suppressed emotion eventually explodes when Viktor risks the safety of the family in a futile attempt to ensure Kata's passage out of France.

The men are remarkably cold and selfish. Viktor, the rationalist, rationalizes his infidelity without breaking a sweat and Liesel is right to question whether he has ever really loved her. Tomas, the philosopher, is so emotionally limited that it is relatively easy for Zdenka to shrug him off. Both men get short shrift from the author. Lanik and Werner are each despicable in their own way, and Hana's husband, Oskar, is just pathetic.

The plot is elegant in the way the house is seamlessly interwoven into the lives of the characters. The arrival of Kata in the family is a contrived coincidence that the reader can accept, unlikely as it is. On the other hand, the superfluous ending with a meeting between the second generation is unnecessary.

Mawer's language is a revelation. I had picked up his Gospel of Judas as a remainder, and put it aside after a few pages. Now of course I will go back to it, but it seems to me that the powerful command of description that he displays in The Glass Room is miles ahead of anything in the earlier book.

There is that rugged Anglo-Saxon feel that British writers have so much more than American writers. As with Robert Goddard, Rennie Airth and even John le Carré, the very language propels the narrative forward. Are they more deeply immersed in Beowulf and Chaucer, or is it the very culture that connects them to these roots?


Mawer has made no secret that the Villa Landauer, with its glass room, is a fictionalization of the Villa Tugendhat, right down to the onyx wall in the spacious livingroom, with his fictional Mesto standing in for Brno and Rainer von Abt representing Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Mawer's passion for the objectives of functionalist architecture is infectious and truly makes the house one of the main characters, one you won't quickly forget.

Reading as multimedia experience

Following on my previous post, more news from the wonderful age of digital media. I was reading The Glass Room by Simon Mawer, which I'm enjoying, and one of the characters in this novel set in Czechoslovakia between the wars is playing Leos Janacek's On an Overgrown Path. In my ignorance, I was unacquainted with Janacek, let alone the work. So I go to the Pandora app on my iPhone and punch in Janacek. Pandora starts playing some lovely solo piano music -- serendipitously the very work mentioned in the book!

In this case, I was reading the trade paperback version of the book, and I plugged my iPhone into our living room stereo. I could have listened to the music on my earbuds, and I could have been reading the book on my iPad and listening to the music at the same time on the iPad. Alternatively, I probably could have ordered the entire work on iTunes, but Pandora has the advantage of being free.

I don't normally listen to music while I'm reading -- I find it distracting. But in this case, the music enhanced my reading experience my taking me further into the world being described by the author. Also, I discovered a new composer!