The case of the vanishing body
John Whitworth
ON THE THIRD DAY by Piers Paul Read Seeker (S7 Warburg, £15.99, pp.282 Unaccountably, well, perhaps not so unaccountably — prizewinning novelists nowadays so often presenting defences in depth against the casual reader — I had not read a novel by Piers Paul Read before. I read this one in two days, then went out and borrowed another (A Married Man), from the public library, so he passes the first and most important test with ease. The blurb describes On The Third Day as an intellectual thriller; fortunately it is an unintellectual one as well, with the body of a saintly priest dangling out of his window in chapter one (did he jump or was he pushed?), and that's the second body; the first, some 2000 years older, has already been found stuffed in a big jar under Jerusalem's Western Wall, and we know who this might be, don't we? I was wondering where the spy-thriller had to go now, with the world-wide conspiracy against all we hold dear apparently crumb- ling on all sides. Now I know the cold- hearted spy-master had simply moved to the Middle East; the bad men here are Zionists (it is probably just as well for Piers Paul Read that they are not sons of The Prophet).
There was a theory a century ago, popular among the chattering classes then, that Jesus never actually existed, was a the Ancient invented!' Brits have 'Look what kind of Dashiell Hammett thin man with no more corporeal existence than Phoebus Apollo or Mr Pecksniff, a thing of inter- polation and forgery, a plot. Now I think Jesus as an invented myth has gone the way of Bacon as Shakespeare. But if he existed and was not the Son of God, then some- where must be the skeleton, smuggled from Gethsemane, of the short-legged, broad-shouldered man with a squint that Tacitus mentions. Do Catholics (I am not one) believe that the discovery of these bones would prove their faith untrue? Most of those I asked were not entirely sure, but thought it probably would, just a bit. That's certainly what the chaps in Read's novel think, though I suspect they underestimate the staying power of the Church. What the hosts of Darwin, Frazer and Hawking failed to budge would scarce- ly be more than momentarily wobbled by a pile of old bones which could be anyone's. No amount of contrary evidence is enough for a believer. Good Lord, but there are people who suppose nobody much went into gas chambers at Auschwitz; that was less than 50 years ago and there are eyewitnesses still living, lots and lots of them. If you put your mind to it, then you really can believe any number of impossi- ble things before breakfast.
Large and lumpy too are the camels we are willing to swallow when we sit down to a thriller, and let us agree that this is one, or at least an entertainment in the Graham Greene sense, something like Stamboul Train where the characters are done in with a broad brush, existing for the plot rather than vice-versa. The two brothers at the centre of this action are rather of that type, worldly Henry and otherworldly Andrew; how fortunate that their parents did not muff it at their christenings — give the apostle's name to the unbeliever and leave the monk to be called after the hammer of his Church. It is also good to know that the late preservation of male virginity has such marvellous effects on your sexual powers when you finally get down to it. I can't say I found it so, but then I was not sustained by faith.
Such flippancy undoubtedly reveals that I cannot take the thing altogether serious- ly, though Read is undoubtedly a serious writer (A Married Man shows that) and a good one too (both novels show that). He shares his Victorian taste for melodrama with Iris Murdoch and Muriel Spark, two of my personal big three among modern novelists, though it perhaps sits more oddly with his more realist style — a style nevertheless capable of a pleasant, ironic wit, as when the Jewish girl who gets Andrew into bed 'recognised that a resur- rected Jesus was her most dangerous rival'. I shall catch up with his old novels when our library's slow readers have given the them back, and I look forward to his next one. They seem to arrive at two-yearly intervals, so that means at least one nice thing will happen in 1992.
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