Dealing with Jesus like a man

Imust confess: I hadn’t read any Anne Rice before. As a Jew, I haven’t read much about Jesus either, as I patiently explained to my editor. Something about “fresh perspective” was mentioned, and the second installment of Rice’s “Christ the Lord” series landed in my trembling hands.

After all, Rice is huge. And Jesus is really, really huge. What if I didn’t like either one?

I’m relieved to report that Rice brings a liveliness and palpable joy to the material, and it’s a page-turner even if you’re pretty sure you know how it all ends. Plus, it pays to know a little about the religion practiced by the pious, if conflicted, man called Yeshua by the villagers of first-century Nazareth.

The first book, “Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt,” focused on a year in Yeshua’s childhood. In “The Road to Cana,” he’s over 30, and agonizingly aware of his fleshly existence. Rice creates a love interest, Avigail, who afflicts Yeshua with what he knows only “by the shape of its absence.” She becomes the central metaphor for all that awkward earthly stuff he has to give up to embrace the larger cause he knows awaits him.

A dizzying parade of relatives can recount the hoopla over Yeshua’s birth and fret over his maddening reluctance to marry. He’s a man, after all, and Rice makes sure the reader knows why he needs that brisk dawn dip in a cold stream. Elder half-brother James, the family buttinsky, rushes out to chastise him.

As if to illustrate the high price of being different, the brothers witness a mob hurl stones at two wide-eyed boys rumored to have been found under the same blanket. There’s no mistaking the message: Those Israelites mean business when it comes to other people’s business.

Beyond the usual body-vs.-soul smackdown, Rice tackles the warring of mundane expectations and divine prophecies: Where is it written he can’t marry?

A storm swirls within the outwardly calm, purposeful carpenter, who always has a kind word for everyone but, so far, no real answers. And he’s getting restless about it:

“I felt as if I were moving upward and outward, as if the night were filled with myriad beings and the rhythm of their song drowned out the anxious beating of my heart. The shell of my body was gone. I was in the stars. But my human soul wouldn’t let me loose. I reached for human language. ‘No, I will accomplish this,’ I said.

“I stood on the dry grass beneath the vault of Heaven. I was small. I was isolated and weary. ‘Lord,’ I said aloud to the faint breeze. ‘How long?’ ”

Exactly what he must accomplish, Rice leaves tantalizingly blank. In imagining the untold parts of Jesus’ life story, she expertly positions him on the cusp of becoming, making the plot crackle with the electricity of what’s possible. Christians will already know where he’s headed -- to neighboring Cana, to a wedding party that will run out of wine, to six enormous water jugs.

In getting Yeshua to where he will begin his mission in earnest, Rice smartly creates a distinction between what’s sexual and sensual, leaving him room to revel in the physical world with all the passion he otherwise denies himself. Even the drought-stricken terrain is described in lush, rhapsodic detail, with no sun-baked stone left unturned.

Visceral details bring an ancient world to life: the clothing, food, Joseph’s crowded house, the throngs along the River Jordan who come at John the Baptist’s urging. The climactic meeting of prophet and messiah glides along in reverent tones that teeter on the brink of treacle:

“I stared forward and saw across John’s face the shadow of a dove moving upwards -- and then I saw the bird itself rising into a great opening of deep blue sky, and I heard a whisper against my ears, a whisper that penetrated the sound of the wings, as though a pair of lips had touched both ears at the same time, and faint as it was, soft and secretive as it was, it seemed the edge of an immense echo.”

It feels almost blasphemous to mention what doesn’t go right in the book. The epic confrontation with Satan is handled unevenly, marked by a wanton use of exclamation points, prompting grimaces for the wrong reasons:

“You lie! You have always lied! If you ruled this world you wouldn’t offer to share a particle of it. You couldn’t. There would be no world for you to share, because you would destroy it. You are yourself The Lie! And you are nothing other than that.

“ ‘Stop it, I demand that you stop!’ he shouted. He put his hands up over his ears.

“ ‘It’s I who’ve come to stop you!’ I responded. ‘It’s I who’ve come to reveal that your despair is a fraud!’ ”

Yeah, OK, I get it.

Still, this is a Yeshua anyone can like, skilled at woodworking and comforting the afflicted, wiry and resilient. His patience understandably, and quite humanly, is wearing thin -- with God and that bossy James. Yeshua’s toughest battle isn’t with the devil but in being at ease with himself -- er, Himself.

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Anne Boles Levy blogs about children’s literature at bookbuds.net and is editor of the Cybils literary awards at blog.cybils.com.