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?' "
