Yeshua: The Gospel of St. Thomas: A Novel

This is the latest winner of Pushcart's annual Editors Book Award, for books that could not find other commercial publishers but were recommended to Pushcart by editors who admire them. And there is a great deal to admire in McNarie's effort, the story of St. Thomas (Teoma), the disciple who doubted Jesus's resurrection. Teoma recalls his life from a jail cell in India, whither he wandered as a holy man many years after the Crucifixion. As a young Jew he is sold into slavery by his family; then he is freed by Jesus (Yeshua), whose band of disciples he joins. Embittered and cynical, however, Teoma is always slightly out of step with the rough fishermen who make up the rest of the disciples. Before his long exile from the Holy Land, dubious to the end about the Resurrection, Teoma tells the others, ``We might as well act as if there's a way beyond death, whether there is or not.'' McNarie's writing is extraordinarily vivid, catching the sights and sounds and smells of biblical Palestine with convincing veracity and a keen sense of the constant political turmoil among Jews, Romans, Greeks and Syrians. Despite all these very considerable virtues, however, the book is too episodic--Teoma remembers incidents from the distant and recent past apparently at random, so the story never has a chance to build--and Jesus, as always, proves hard to characterize; here he is convincingly human, and moody, but rather prosaic. (Apr.)