Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt
Anne Rice (Knopf)

She built her reputation writing books about vampires and witches, exploring her own faith as her characters wrestled with timeless themes of good and evil. Now Anne Rice has taken on the story of Christ himself.  Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt is a novel written as a first-person account by Jesus of his very early years. In an afterword Rice details her research -- the years she spent studying Christ and his times, delving deeply into academic treatises. So the book should have been a fascinating fictional distillation of all that she learned. Unfortunately, what she has written is worthy of a Sunday-school Life of Jesus. Rice starts from a position of absolute faith in the divinity of Jesus. The first thing the small boy in the book does is bring a playmate, whom he'd accidentally killed, back to life. In what is apparently the first in a planned series of books Rice addresses none of the scholarly doubt that she must have come across in the course of her study. Her first-person technique is also problematic, given the age of Jesus at the beginning. What are obviously the remembrances of a grown man are told in the at-times authentic language of a preschooler. Rice attempts to capture the cadences of the verses of the Bible, using commas and "and" a lot: "Meanwhile the Romans tried everywhere in Judea to put down the rebellion, and they still had the Arabs marching with them, and the Arabs burned Judean villages. And the whole family of King Herod was still in Rome fighting and disputing before Augustus, as to who should be King." This might have been an interesting device if it had been used through the whole book, but she fails to maintain the rhythm. What Rice does do well in Christ the Lord is describe Jesus's world, the division of labour -- and impossibility of privacy -- within the extended families, the roles of women and men, of church and state.-Kim Convert.