Piety courts brazenness as “The Road to Cana” raises personal
questions about its main character, since Yeshua bar
Joseph (its name
for Jesus) is now over 30. Ms. Rice describes this stage of his life
with awe and respect. But she does present Yeshua as the subject of
rumors — said to be what was once called a confirmed bachelor. And she
gives him a crush on one of his relatives, a 15-year-old girl.So
“The
Road to Cana” perches on the brink of blasphemy. But it succeeds
in treating Yeshua’s humanity as an essential part of his divinity.
That humanity nearly takes the form of bodice-ripping (“The man in me
knew that we were alone, and the man in me knew that I could have this
woman”), now that Ms. Rice’s confidence about her daunting subject
allows some of her familiar proclivities to emerge. Gone is the earlier
book’s attention to pottery and textiles. Along come suppressed
passions and eyebrow-raising about Yeshua’s unattached status. Does he
care about nothing but carpentry? Is he devoid of interest in women? So
the cattier residents of Nazareth seem to think.“Well, they
talk, don’t they?,” says Jason, a gossip whose telltale linen robes are
a little too natty for Nazareth. “Where is your wife, Yeshua, where are
your children?” Since this book begins with the stoning to death of two
young men said to be interested in each other (“What, two young ones
under the same blanket on a winter night?”) this becomes a terribly
provocative question. The first half of this book lingers
eagerly upon its characters’ unfulfilled desires. In its opening scene,
Yeshua’s thoughts of Avigail, his beautiful “young kinswoman,” lead him
straight to a cold bath in a Nazareth spring. But Ms. Rice also
presents the bigger biblical picture: ongoing tensions between the
Jewish community, of which Yeshua is part, and all-powerful Rome, with
the threat of Pontius Pilate’s army on the horizon. Some of this
historical detail calls for awkward mouthfuls of exposition. As the
same Jason proclaims: “And now as we all know, this equestrian,
Sejanus, rules the
world for this heartless Emperor, whose own son,
Drusus, Sejanus murdered!”But “The Road to Cana” keeps Yeshua at
the center of its broad canvas. And once his pining for Avigail and
regret about her imminent marriage are put to rest, the book is free to
describe the majesty of Yeshua’s transformation. At the novel’s precise
midpoint, Avigail throws herself at Yeshua with the steam heat of a
Rice vampire, sobbing, “I am your harlot.” Yeshua fights back his
desires in order to refuse her. “You’re really the child of angels,”
she realizes, in a tone of disappointment. But the book is clear in
purpose and bound for glory from this point on.And Ms. Rice,
when inspired, can deliver hypnotic, incantatory prose that celebrates
Yeshua’s ascension. “I moved slowly towards what was at last going to
separate me from all around me,” he says as he begins to feel the
divinity within him. Many readers will be lured by the promise of
simply rendered holiness to “The Road to Cana.” Here are its rewards. “I
had to see it beyond hamlet or town or camp,” Yeshua says, embarking on
his road of no return. “I had to seek it where there was nothing but
the burnt sand, and the searing wind, and the highest cliffs of the
land. I had to seek it as if it was nowhere and as if it contained
nothing — when in fact it was the palm of the hand that held me.” To
put it more nervily, and of course Ms. Rice does: “Well, now I knew
just what it meant to be the man who knew he was God.”Then “The
Road to Cana” actually sets itself on the road to Cana: to the place
where Jesus’ first miracle is performed, as described in the Gospel of
John. With John the Baptist (John bar Zechariah) and Satan (“Ahriman,
Mastema, Satanel, Satan, Lucifer”) now present and aware of Yeshua as
their Messiah, the book moves to the wedding at Cana. Here is when
Yeshua transforms water into wine. Ms. Rice presents this
miracle as she has the other biblical events on which her fiction is
based: she decoratively embroiders the Gospels while fully respecting
their message. In her version, the wedding becomes that of Avigail, who
is an entirely fictitious character. The absence of wine at the wedding
becomes calamitous, though the Bible describes it without alarm. “It
was a disaster of unlikely and dreadful proportions,” Ms. Rice
maintains. The book ends on a note of best-sellerly promise,
mindful of how much more is yet to come. “Whatever it was, well, it had
only begun,” Yeshua says, signaling that Ms. Rice’s rendering will be
epic and sustained. And with what sounds more like a politician’s voice
than a Messianic one, Yeshua declares: “I’ve entered history for the
whole of it. And I won’t be stopped.”GET THIS BOOK FREE.BUY SELL RENT BOOKS ONLINE - ON MY BLOG.http://workfromhomedepot.blogspot.com/2008/01/review-books-summary-abstracts.html