The Final Testament of the Holy Bible by James Frey – review
Mark Lawson hails James Frey’s new Messiah
Christian worshippers recite the Nicene Creed, which includes the promise that Jesus Christ will “come again”. This article of faith provides the epigraph to a novel in which James Frey imagines the Anglican and Roman Catholic faithful of modern New York being confronted with the apparent answer to their prayer.
The fate that would await a contemporary messiah has long been a standard essay topic in religious education classes and is also regularly attempted in fiction. These comeback narratives divide between stories in which the status of the saviour figure remains ambiguous, such as John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany, and fiction in which someone directly claims to be Christ for present times. Frey’s book extends the second genre – his hero has the beard of conventional iconography and a gaze said to resemble “being stared down by a statue” – although it surely represents a first in the dust-jacket’s startling affirmation of an overlap between protagonist and author.