And so, with a straightening of my cap and a hoist of my satchel I return to the valleys green and the skies of that ambitiously dense grey. And a joy it is to see the differences that have evolved, the progress that has been made in my absence. Gordon Brown is on the verge of getting the most important job in the land without even being interviewed by his employers ie. The British People; nice to see Dan Brown finally go on trial although I was disappointed to find out it was for plagiarism rather than crimes against syntax; and I hear Derren Brown got some businessmen to commit daylight robbery. British democracy a sham, a Bestseller being found to have ripped off its plotline, crooks in The City. Nothing has changed in the slightest, actually, has it?
But I’m not sat here on my British computer waiting for all my work to vanish into the cosmos and my screen to freeze, just to talk about the spaghetti mess that is life within these shores. I, of all people, am resigned to the fact that in the last great battle of mankind, it was Thatcher that triumphed and her pox-faced children will probably never let up. So it is whilst wrapped in this overwhelming cloak of defeatism, I have decided to write a new book rather than (yet again) revise the old one. More accurately I have decided to create a town, a Welsh border town, to be exact, and within the confines of this working class, graffito etched, gum trodden haven I am going to set a series of intertwining short stories. To keep myself on my own toes (rather than on other’s, Dan Brown) I am going to fill the stories with dregs and ghosts and wenches and poets and dwarves and villains. And it was whilst sketching out the villains that the story “broke” of the scholars that had finally translated an ancient text that had been discovered on papyri in an earthen pot in Egypt in the 1970’s. Now, you may have missed this news – news that is significant on an almost unfathomable scale (but a scale that gets less coverage than the Liberal leadership race) – as it was subject to very little notice as far as I am aware, outside of the more whimsical areas of the Sunday magazines, religious journals and probably something in the Daily Mail about how Jesus was an asylum seeker. Strange, as this text was actually a new gospel - that’s right, a new gospel. (I believe some damp rolled up cardboard covered in a litany of clichés won the Liberal leadership race, by the way, if you didn’t catch it).
So, here we are presented with a brand new book that fits into those other books that have pretty much designed all of Western Civilisation, its culture, its wars, its laws, its greatest art and its greatest tragedies as well as its greatest historical ignominies. And this is not the memoirs of Timothy, long suspected suppressed by the Vatican, or the musings of Peter, no – scholars have just finished deciphering the actual gospel of Judas Iscariot. The Christian authorities seem far less impressed by this than I am. It appears that the new gospel (actually a copy of an original Gnostic text reproduced in 180AD) suggests that not only was Judas Jesus’ favourite disciple, but that he betrayed his teacher on command from the man himself, and now sits with Jesus in heaven. It also mentions nothing of the resurrection, which I have to say, if I was as tormented by the Furies as we have been taught Judas was, I might have been moved to mention it in my memoirs.
But the Catholic Church are having nothing to do with it, blankly saying it means nothing – the theological equivalent of closing their eyes so we can’t see them. This is hardly a scandal on the Churches part; ignoring heretics is the closest modernity can offer them to burning at the stake and of course there is the modern twist that most people will endeavour to make up their own minds on matters of faith nowadays, regardless. So what could the reason possibly be for such a subdued reaction to the discovery that should be shuddering the very bones of Western society? I have an idea: Is there a greater literary villain than Judas Iscariot? The man that betrayed to death the Son of God - you have to say even the Devil might have thought twice about that one. It is surely true that we find the villains in literature far more arresting than the heroes – for all the enjoyment I have found in the likes of Sherlock Holmes, Van Helsing or D’Artagnan and company it is only ever the foreplay to the appearance of Moriarty, Dracula or Richelieu. I’m not suggesting that Judas must remain a villain for nostalgic reasons, but very few things have a hold over an audience like the presence of corruption and wrongness. Plus every story needs a villain, not least the Greatest Story Ever Told.
Of course, I am flying away with my own fancy – the true answer is, inevitably, more defeatist; could the reason be that people just aren’t looking anymore? It was not so long ago that mankind was still searching for truth and meaning, but now we no longer go to the moon. Galileo and Da Vinci would be controlling the weather if they had access to today’s technology. Aside from the mainly Jewish interests unearthed at Qumran in the 1940’s religious texts have not been updated for hundreds and hundreds of years. We have just stopped looking. We have our version of events, what could we possibly benefit from delving any deeper other than being made to look foolish? Instead, we are all happy to just sit back and let the Browns get on with it.
This article appears in CFUK magazine spring 2006