Jacket of The Testament of Mary by Colm ToibinThe Testament of Mary by Colm Tóibín (Viking)

Some people regard Colm Tóibín as the greatest living practitioner of English prose, and I think they may be right. His essays, stories and novels are supple and lucid and gorgeously phrased; but perhaps the best thing about them is their reticence. Tóibín is a literary altruist: his words and rhythms are recognisably his own, but he never draws attention to himself or to his extraordinary intelligence and artistry. He prefers to allow his language to be inhabited by the ideas and experiences of others. In his brilliant 2004 novel The Master he channelled the 19th-century world of the novelist Henry James, and five years later, in Brooklyn, he became the host and interlocutor of an inexperienced Irish girl who takes a job in America in the 1950s.

His latest undertaking is no less adventurous, and equally wonderful: a first-person narrative set 2000 years ago, giving expression to the sorrow and anger of a crotchety old widow called Mary, as she recalls life in her native Palestine from lonely exile in some nameless Mediterranean town. Tóibín’s Mary is based on a well-known historical character – extremely well-known, in fact, though no one knows much about her apart from the fact that she was the mother of Jesus.

She received scant attention in the New Testament: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were never very impressed by the female sex, and as far as they were concerned Mary was a little girl who, having become pregnant without losing her virginity, gave birth because she had to, and suffered insults from her child, as parents do, before becoming a helpless member of the crowd that watched him being nailed to a cross and left to die. But anyone who reflects on these fragments is bound to wonder what she made of the events she was caught up in, and the gossip that circulated amongst early Christians soon took on a life of its own.

The Roman Church, perhaps embarrassed at the conspicuous gynocratic deficit of Christianity compared with its pagan rivals, incorporated some of the stories into a major cult of the Blessed Virgin Mary. When the Church underwent its triumphant makeover in the Renaissance, depictions of the Madonna and Child replaced Crucifixions as the Christian icon of choice. To this day many Catholics revere the Mother of God (heretically no doubt) as if she were a divinity on much the same footing as the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. The cult of Mary brought a slew of complications in its wake.

Harping on virginity may seem saintly and ethereal, but in practice it is likely to excite unruly thoughts about how it can be lost. The origins of Christianity got mixed up with such all-too-human matters as sex, childbirth and intergenerational strife; and when the Church, with notable assistance from Leonardo da Vinci, began to promote Saint Anne as the virgin mother of the virgin mother, it only added to its troubles.

The Protestant reformation was in large part a reaction against Papist veneration of Mary and her mum (Annie the Granny as she is sometimes called), but once the question of Jesus and his earthly family had been raised, it was hard to slap it down. In the early years of the 20th century, for example, the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who was decidedly unChristian, wrote a gripping sequence of poems (Das Marienleben) that imagine what the poor child-mother must have been through, and his words were given a powerful musical setting by the thoroughly secular composer Paul Hindemith. One of the uses of Mary, it seems, is to provide non-believers with access to the turbulent emotional world of Christianity.

Mary’s plight makes a perfect topic for Colm Tóibín. He was brought up in Ireland, and attended a Catholic boarding school where, as he has recalled, he indulged in erotic fantasies about the priests and received detailed moral instruction “from men who were child molesters”. He now describes himself as a “collapsed Catholic”, and in The Testament of Mary he lends his well-modulated voice to an unhappy old lady, a stranger in a strange land who finds solace in offering prayers to the exotic goddess Artemis.

It must be 20 years since she escaped from Jerusalem, when the authorities were persecuting anyone with links to her judicially slaughtered son, and she has been doing her best to forget about him ever since. But she has now been tracked down by a couple of his aging disciples, intent on extracting information that will be of use to them in constructing a new religion centred on him. She is so furious that she cannot bring herself to utter his name, though she muses about the band of “misfits” he used to bring back to the house – “children like himself, or men without fathers, or men who could not look a woman in the eye”.

Her boy and his buddies would talk with an intensity that she found repellent and absurd, and he would put on pompous airs and present himself as a prophet. She remembered warning him about the dangers gathering about him: “woman, what have I to do with thee?” he asked, and never heard her quiet rejoinder, “I am your mother.”

The two disciples ask her to tell them all about the crucifixion, but she cannot remember anything apart from the noise and confusion, the screams of her son, and a man who was feeding live rabbits to a hawk. They want circumstantial details about how Jesus was taken down from the cross and laid in her arms, though they know as well as she does that she fled the scene before he died.

Her own opinion is simple: he should have heeded her warnings, so that he could take care of her when she grew old. If her interrogators want to weave stories round his horrible death, she cannot stop them, but she is sure of one thing: “it was not worth it.” They have no time for regrets, however: they need to complete the business that Jesus began in the name of his father. “His father?” she asks in astonishment. They explain that they are planning to change the world. “The world?” she says: “All of it?” And they say, “Yes.”

She decides to emulate her useless son for once, making a prophecy of her own: these men are going to steal her torments from her and turn them into a “sweet story”, she says – “a sweet story that will grow poisonous as bright berries that hang low on trees”.