2024/014: Him — Geoff Ryman

"...there is a world in which God does not kill me.”
“What’s different in that world?” Maryam wanted to make this world like that one.
“I can only glimpse it and it’s like a fan opening over and over with the same faces only slightly different. Sometimes different stars. Sometimes… sometimes I was born a man.” [loc. 4552]

What if Jesus was born female?

This is the story of Maryam, who was told by 'fire in the shape of something like a person' that she would give birth to a child made only of herself, and that this child would be special to God. Maryam is a clever woman: she arranges to marry Yosef, who is being exiled for his outspoken views on theology. They make a life in Nazareth, a stony and desolate place where Maryam gives birth to a girl she names Avigayil. She's identical to Maryam, precocious, and loves to listen to Yosef reading scripture. And, when she is five and a village boy dies of a fever, she declares that her name is now Yehushua -- her dead friend's name. "That's a boy's name," says Maryam. "I'm a boy," insists the child.

Maryam does not deal well with a daughter who claims to be a son. Yosef is sory that the child, being a girl, cannot preach: but he sees that 'The body says girl but the spirit says different'. And Yehushua -- later Yehush -- lives as a boy, argues with priests, works with his hands, and occasionally says things that Maryam finds profoundly unnerving. For years she refers to him as the Cub, or 'it': a large part of the novel deals with Maryam coming to terms with the nature of this child she bore, who is also the embodiment of God.

The God here is thoroughly alien, trying to learn about life and death and pain through Yehush; trying to understand the world; needing to know 'what it was like to be created by someone else'. Yehush's miracle-working is uncomfortable and unnerving, and his humanity is leavened with something quite other -- something that can see aspects of the future, something that doesn't always understand the way that humans move through time. ("We can’t see the future, you know. For us to see things, they have to happen first.") While many of the events of the novel are familiar from the Bible, the non-anglicisation of names and the perspective of Maryam (and, briefly, Yehush's envious sister Babatha, who strongly rejects Yehush's male identity) makes those tales new and strange. I was captivated: by Maryam, by miracles, by God, by Yehush's foreknowledge of his fate. I loved the historical and social detail -- this feels a well-researched book, though the research is in a hundred little details rather than an authorial lecture -- and the harshness of the desert, and the sheer strangeness of Yehush's life and death.

Fulfils the ‘Historical fiction set in West Asia’ rubric of the Something Bookish Reading Challenge.