Book review: Lamb by Christopher Moore
This may be one of the most muddled and conflicted reviews I’ve done this year, and while there’s still plenty of time for something else to twist me up, I doubt I’ll find anything this close. Technically, this book was a colossal failure, and it was also brilliant and well researched. So how the hell do I rate that?
To start with, I’m going to break one of my normal review rules. Normally, I never compare a book to anything I’ve written, because it’s kind of tacky, like advertising in a place where it’s not appropriate. But this particular book, I never published, and I never will, so I feel it’s okay to break the rule this one time. The book I wrote was called Dave: A Messiah, and the premise was that God had come to a stand-up comedian and told him that he would be the next Messiah. Dave’s job was basically telling lots of Christians that they were doing religion and service to God all wrong. (Which is what Joshua did to his religious leaders at the time, and Dave was simply following in the footsteps of the last Messiah.) He preaches to gays, helps a transsexual have an immaculate conception, and saves a rabbi from a faulty hotplate. He becomes very unpopular with conservative Christians, but since he’s pulling off genuine miracles, they’re afraid of calling him out. At the end of the book, the President tries to coerce Dave into healing his incurable STD, and Dave finds out that God is setting him up to die. The conservatives rally behind the President and push for Dave to be executed as a traitor. So Dave dies, and a new religion is founded by his Witnesses. Dave dies by lethal injection, so all his Witnesses wear silver syringes.
The book was supposed to be a comedy, and after I finished it, my first thought was, This isn’t funny. I made some attempts to revise it, but no matter how many jokes I added, I couldn’t find humor in the story. The book was essentially a long sermon that could be summed up as “You righteous fuckers have missed the point.” So I made it a trunk novel, and I decided that some topics could never be funny no matter how hard I tried.
Anyway, Lamb was sent to me by a fan of my stuff who said Moore and I had similar ideas about Joshua, and they felt I would enjoy the book. I set it aside for a while, waiting for a time when I was in the mood for good comedy. I took Lamb down and got started on it, and…and it’s not funny.
This is not to say the story is bad, or that the writing is bad. It’s quite clear that Moore went to extensive lengths to research this story, and he does make the “history” of Joshua’s training interesting for the most part. But every single joke fell flat for me, and I honestly didn’t laugh once.
An early scene illustrates my problem, and I think your ability to find humor in the situation may be tied directly to your level of empathy. In the scene when Levi, AKA: Biff, meets Joshua as a child, the Messiah-to-be is resurrecting a lizard by putting it in his mouth before giving the animal back to his little brother, who at the first threat of being bitten smashes the lizard’s head with a rock. So long as you don’t think too hard about the lizard, this scene might be funny. But all I could think about was how terrified the lizard must be, and how childishly cruel Joshua was to keep reviving him and handing him off to be killed again. The joke was killed because I was looking at the scene the “wrong” way.
None of the the jokes worked for me throughout the book. Not the sex jokes, not the puns, and not the twisting of real events into something supposedly humorous. Every once in a while I’d say, “Okay, that was almost funny.” But I never got anything close to a laugh out of this book. Not even a quiet snort.
The other problem for me throughout the book is the nagging thought that if I was taking this stuff literally, God comes across as a sadistic asshole. And I suppose if one is taking the bible literally instead of a set of parables, the same sentiment emerges. Here’s a deity who tortures people without intervening, always to make a point about his plans, and who demands that everyone love him despite his habits of torturing his followers. If you don’t love him and follow all of his rules to the letter, he’s going to roast your ass for all eternity…because he loves you.
Even with his only son, God sends him out to be tormented, commanding Joshua never to sin so that he can be set up as the fall guy for all of humanity. He demands perfection from his son when he himself is flawed, cruel, and petty.
This is not the God I believe in, but it is the God that many people choose to worship by way of a literal translation of the bible. Lamb is written in much the same vein, suggesting that God would send a child out to witness the horrors of the world, prohibit him from knowing anything of love or pleasure, and not once actually speak directly to the child to answer his many questions about his role as the Messiah. It’s a miracle that Joshua didn’t give him the finger and wander off to marry Mary Magdalan instead.
And therein lies the problem. Is Moore’s story entertaining? Absolutely. Do I find it to be in the same spirit as the four canon gospels? Yes. I think it’s a great book that cleverly twists what we know about Josuha with some high quality fictional bullshitting. But it’s also not funny. And at times, it drags while Joshua is training with the so-called wise men.
That said, how do I rate a book like this? If I’m judging it as a comedy, I’d have to go with a pretty low score. But I tend to give out low scores for books that I found lots of flaws with the writing, and there’s only this one glaring flaw to be noted here. The thing is, I mostly liked this story. Okay, Biff is a lech and a bit of an asshole, just like the angel Raziel said. But hey, assholes often have more interesting stories to tell than saints who’ve never known any temptations. And okay, sometimes the book dragged on a bit. But I don’t need a story to maintain a breakneck pace to recognize it’s a good yarn.
In the end, I have to give Lamb four stars. Moore’s done a fine job of presenting a new gospel detailing the life of the Messiah, and while I didn’t laugh once, there were several times when I got choked up or teary-eyed. The writing is good, the research is sound, and the story was definitely worth the time it took me to read it. I’d recommend it to anyone, regardless of your favorite genre. I just can’t call it funny, and this seems to bolster my theory that there are some topics you can’t make funny no matter how hard you try. But even if this fails for me as a comedy, I really did enjoy the book.
