And in return I will do for them what I can, but no more than that. I like it that they feed me and pay for my clothes and protect me.

Memory fills my body as much as blood and bones. They are too locked into their vast and insatiable needs and too dulled by the remnants of a terror we all felt then to have noticed that I remember everything. When I seem not to remember what they think I must remember. They think I do not understand what is slowly growing in the world they think I do not see the point of their questions and do not notice the cruel shadow of exasperation that comes hooded in their faces or hidden in their voices when I say something vague or foolish, something which leads us nowhere. And it is enough for me to know that it will end. Before the final rest comes this long awakening. I will come down these stairs as the dawn breaks, as the dawn insinuates its rays of light into this room. Maybe my eyes know that soon they will be closed for ever. Maybe I do not need to dream, or need to rest. Or there is nothing further to be gained from sleep. They think that I do not know the elaborate nature of their desires. I am being cared for, and questioned softly, and watched. There is something hungry and rough in them, a brutality boiling in their blood, which I have seen before and can smell as an animal that is being hunted can smell. They appear more often now, both of them, and on every visit they seem more impatient with me and with the world. Tóibín’s tour de force of imagination and language is a portrait so vivid and convincing that our image of Mary will be forever transformed. This woman whom we know from centuries of paintings and scripture as the docile, loving, silent, long-suffering, obedient, worshipful mother of Christ becomes a tragic heroine with the relentless eloquence of Electra or Medea or Antigone.

Mary judges herself ruthlessly (she did not stay at the foot of the cross until her son died-she fled, to save herself), and her judgment of others is equally harsh. She does not agree that her son is the Son of God nor that his death was “worth it” nor that the “group of misfits he gathered around him, men who could not look a woman in the eye,” were holy disciples. She has no interest in collaborating with the authors of the Gospel, who are her keepers. In the ancient town of Ephesus, Mary lives alone, years after her son’s crucifixion. “Tóibín is at his lyrical best in this beautiful and daring work” ( The New York Times Book Review) that portrays Mary as a solitary older woman still seeking to understand the events that become the narrative of the New Testament and the foundation of Christianity-shortlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Prize.

The testament of mary by colm toibin