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How Far to Bethlehem?

Norah Lofts

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Dec 05, 2008 Werner rated it it was amazing

Shelves: historical-fiction

Like many English people in her generation (she was born in 1904), the late British historical novelist Norah Lofts didn't wear her religious faith on her sleeve. In the works from her pen that I'd read earlier, the treatment of characters with strong religious beliefs is actually more often unfavorable than favorable, and there's no explicit literary evidence of a specifically Christian outlook; her usual style is simply to describe normal human life (warts and all) without much commentary. I h Like many English people in her generation (she was born in 1904), the late British historical novelist Norah Lofts didn't wear her religious faith on her sleeve. In the works from her pen that I'd read earlier, the treatment of characters with strong religious beliefs is actually more often unfavorable than favorable, and there's no explicit literary evidence of a specifically Christian outlook; her usual style is simply to describe normal human life (warts and all) without much commentary. I had promised a Goodreads friend that I'd read and review Lofts' foray into nonfiction, Women in the Old Testament; but before doing that, I wanted to get some handle on where the author was really coming from religiously. This novel, I thought, might offer a good window into that; and I wasn't disappointed!

This is a fictionalized reconstruction of events leading up to and surrounding the birth of Christ. It doesn't take long for the reader to realize that the author is writing from a solidly Christian perspective. The miraculous nature of the child to be born is taken seriously; his virginal conception, the angelic annunciations to Mary and Joseph, the vision of Zechariah in the Temple and the miraculous conception of John the Baptist, the choir of angels proclaiming the news to the shepherds, all are treated as realities, and the scanty details of the biblical record are all respected. Most tellingly, Lofts preserves Gabriel's statement to Joseph that Jesus will "save his people from their sins" (not simply from their foreign oppressors) and calls attention to the novel and significant character of that idea.

Writers of fiction based on biblical narratives often face a challenge in that the stories are so familiar that it's hard to make them fresh. And with this story, so many of the participants are very little revealed in the scriptural text as anything but stick figures; we don't even know how many "wise men" there were, let alone their names or anything about them, and the innkeeper isn't even mentioned in Luke's gospel, though we surmise there was one. If we think about the personalities of the Magi or the shepherds at all, it's usually through a mental lens that makes them a monolithic fraternity of sanitized plaster saints; and even the individual characteristics and traits of central figures like Mary and Joseph are hard to reconstruct. But Lofts has risen admirably to the challenge here. By concentrating on the "unknown" figures of the stories, their backgrounds and motivations, as she moves them to their convergence with historical destiny in Bethlehem, she allows herself ample scope to make the story fresh and new. Even with Mary and Joseph, Elizabeth and Zachariah, she does a great job of fleshing them out, making them real and three- dimensional. Characterization is always Lofts' strong suit, and never more so than here. (And these characters are definitely not sanitized plaster saints; when you read this, you'll see the wise men, and Josodad the shepherd, in ways that you never imagined them. :-)) It's also a strong point of the writing that the supernatural aspects are real, but --as they are in real life-- subtle; they don't overwhelm the normal world, or negate the need for faith. (We often mistakenly assume that life in Biblical times was lived in a kind of miraculous halo, making the exercise of faith super-easy; Lofts makes it quite clear that the ordinary world has always been a place that makes it hard to believe in the extraordinary, and that throws us trials and challenges to the very idea of meaning or benevolence in the universe.) I was really impressed by the quality of spiritual and psychological insights and reflections here, and the way they emerge naturally from the pattern of the story. The plotting, too, is outstanding, like the careful weaving of multicolored threads into a picture where everything fits, and the superintending hand of God's providence is recognizable.

That isn't to say that there aren't some flaws here. Lofts follows medieval ecclesiastical tradition in naming the wise men, and Mary's parents; it's fairly improbable that this tradition has any basis in fact, and Balthazar is certainly not an African name, nor is Melchior a Korean one. (In fact, most scholars would be inclined to see Persia or Mesopotamia, with their attested astrological traditions, as a more likely place for the original observation of the star than Korea). The author was primarily a writer of historical fiction set much later, and in England; her knowledge of the past in this time and place isn't as strong, so some of her details are iffy, IMO. (For instance, while the use of candles is attested in the ancient Near East, I doubt if it was as common as she suggests; I think she was influenced by the King James Version's mistranslation of the word for "oil lamp," which would have been the usual means of illumination.) She also at times reads later theology into Jewish beliefs in this period; despite the Septuagint translation of Isaiah 7:14, Jews of that day did not expect the Messiah to be virgin-born, and the identification of the Messiah and Isaiah's suffering Servant of Yahweh was an insight original with Jesus himself. Finally, contrary to popular Western folk superstition, angels and humans are two different species, and dead humans don't become angels (nor did the Jews in this era imagine that they did). But these are nits, and picking them doesn't detract from the literary achievement here. This is, simply put, an outstanding work of its type, and a considerable feather in Loft's literary cap --perhaps her greatest work. ...more

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