Ever tried working your way through one of the world’s great art museums without a plan? Before you even finish with the Middle Ages, you start coming down with a case of Madonna fatigue—the feeling that you can’t possibly look at another canvas or statue depicting the mother of Jesus. In fact, given the enormous number of Annunciations, Nativity scenes, Pietas, and Assumptions in which she’s had a starring role, Mary is probably her son’s only serious competition for the title of Most Painted Figure in Western Art.
Tóibín is up to something more than mere blasphemy. As a novelist, he excels at worming his way into the psyche of seemingly unknowable characters—even, in The Master, the deeply secretive Henry James. Here, he succeeds in making Mary flesh by letting her break her patient silence at last and express the fury and heartbreak we’d expect a mother would feel as she watches her son become a stranger and then a dead man.
