ANGER!

5 Reviews=Anger - Christopher Moore - Lamb, The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal

At Christmas, I was given this book to read and decided to include it as one of my novels for the Critical Monkey Challenge as this is not my usual "cup of tea".
Nonetheless, having been kicked out of a church and as a lover of Monty Python's "Life of Brian", I had high hopes that this might just tickle my funny bone and compensate for all those hours spent sitting on hard pews during my childhood.

I know, there are people out there who think that this novel is absolutely hysterical...and while parts of it were pretty funny, I really don't think that it qualifies as "hysterical". Quite frankly, I much preferred, Corey Redekop's "Shelf Monkey" (which uses a much more original premise -- no, he is not paying me to say that, nor am I finagling to get another free book) and Jessica Grant's "Come, Thou Tortoise" (which contains some genuinely funny Newfie humour).

WHAT I LIKED:
Here is one of the passages from "Lamb" that appealed to my cynical nature. Joshua asks about being a stone cutter.
"'Alphaeus,' Joshua called, 'does the work get easier once you know what you are doing?'
'Your lungs grow thick with stone dust and your eyes bleary from the sun and fragments thrown up by the chisel. You pour your lifeblood out into works of stone for Romans who will take your money in taxes to feed soldiers who will nail your people to crosses for wanting to be free. Your back breaks, your bones creak, your wife screeches at you, and your children torment you with open, begging mouths, like greedy baby birds in the nest. You go to bed every night so tired and beaten that you pray to the Lord to send the angel of death to take you in your sleep so you don't have to face another morning. It also has its downside.'
'Thanks,' Joshua said. He looked at me, one eyebrow raised.
'I for one, am excited,' I said. 'I am ready to cut some stone. Stand back, Josh, my chisel is on fire. Life is stretched out before us like a great bazaar, and I can't wait to taste the sweets to be found there.' ...
'Biff, are you sure you weren't sent here by the Devil to vex me?'" p. 50-51

Moore also knows how to take our shared experiences and put them into another context. On p. 185, a monster who is chasing Biff remarks, "'It's been a long time since I've eaten a Jew. A good Jew sticks to your ribs. That's the problem with Chinese, you eat six or seven of them and in a half hour you're hungry again. No offense, miss.'"

Another aspect of Moore's writing that I enjoyed was the seamless inclusion of his research. For example, he refers to "'The three jewels of Tao: compassion, moderation, and humility. Balthasar said compassion leads to courage, moderation leads to generosity, and humility leads to leadership.'" p. 195 Also funny was a comment concerning reincarnation from a Buddhist monk to Biff: "'You'll be working off your karma for a thousand years as a dung beetle just to evolve to the point of being dense." p. 244

Further, Moore really seems to know his Scripture and creates a fictional childhood and youth for the Messiah during which he develops skills (such as raising creatures from the dead and the multiplication of limited food) which later become useful in the performance of miracles; and during which he learns Truths (such as the need to 'Turn the other cheek.') which later appear in a modified form in his messages to the masses.

WHAT I DIDN'T LIKE:
I found that Biff's (and other's) unending sexual experiences (some of which were quite unsavoury) and the foul language used by many of the characters interfered with the illusion of being in the first century. Perhaps that was deliberate but I personally found it detracted from the "fun". "'You owe me, you ungrateful fucks!'" p. 272

I also didn't like the sojourn into India. Don't get me wrong, I love the ridiculous and I adore serious silly but I found that the description of the sacrifices made to Kali were simply not funny but gratuitously shocking. "It was still hours from the height of the ceremony at midnight, when the children would be hacked to death, but we wanted to be there in time to stop the revelers from cutting off the children's fingers if we could. Now, the wooden elephants were empty on their turntables, but the altar of Kali was already filling with gruesome tribute. The heads of a thousand goats had been laid on the altar before the goddess, and the blood ran slick over the stones and in the grooves that channeled it into large brass pots at the corner of the altar...worshippers danced in the sticky shower as the blood flowed down upon them...'They're not the heads of the children?' 'No, I think those are the heads of strangers who happened down the road we were on before Rumi came along to pull us into the grass'...After the severed heads were dispersed across the altar, the female acolytes came out of the crowd dragging the headless corpse of a man which they laid on the steps leading to the altar. Each one mimed having intercourse with the corpse, then rubbed their genitalia against the bloody stump of its neck before dancing away, blood and ochre dripping down the insides of their thighs." p. 275, 276. Pretty disgusting....

Finally, I found that the retelling of the story of the life of the Messiah (contained in the Bible's gospels) was neither necessary, nor innovative but actually pretty boring. Maybe there is such a thing as "too much of a good thing".

OK the Day of Judgement dawns -- How many Critical Monkeys does Scrat allocate to Christopher Moore's "Lamb"?

I was going to say FOUR but given his descriptions of the Kali rituals in India, I think THREE CRITICAL MONKEYS as well as a GRUESOME, BLOODY, DRIPPING BODY PART or TWO placed on some altar somewhere might be more appropriate.