Lazarus is Dead | Richard Beard

Book Covers

What now?

There’s something odd about the proverbial ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’. The saying implies that book covers were once a byword for rubbish design, and consistently misrepresented the content or quality of the book inside. Or perhaps the saying dates from the days before design, and means don’t expect every story to be leathery and monochrome. I don’t know.

What I do know is that writers have difficult relationships with their covers. Partly this is because the covers are using a visual language in which the writer may not be literate – I may have written a paragraph about an important tree, but on the cover it’s just a tree. It is brown. What is a potential reader supposed to understand from that?

It’s also hard to know what to make of a new cover because publishers are always ‘thrilled’. This means they’re finished, they have something to show, but through decades of industry misuse everyone must be thrilled. Hope you like it as much as we do.

And as it happens I do indeed, very much, like the new cover for the American edition of Lazarus is Dead. I feel most mornings like this stick-man Lazarus, wondering if it’s safe to come out. There’s so much life out there, it would seem churlish not to take another step.

Europa Editions, Lazarus is Dead

Lazarus is Reviewed

So far Lazarus is Dead has been reviewed in the Financial Times, The Spectator, The Eastern Daily Press, The Times Literary Supplement, The Glasgow Herald, The Sunday Times, The Catholic Herald, Sunday Business Post (Ireland), The Times and The Observer. Not everyone is entirely with the programme, but then a book that pleased everyone wouldn’t be a book by me. Also, there’s a writing truism that a bad review is better than none at all. From experience, I can attest that this is so (when the wounds begin to heal).

Standard practice at this point is to extract the best bits of these reviews to give the impression of unanimous praise. Or in a different mood I could do quite the opposite, often from the same review. I’ve done both here, so that anyone with preconceptions can keep them intact. From a couple of the reviews I couldn’t find anything good, but then elsewhere was nothing bad.

(If I haven’t included a link the reviews are unavailable online or are behind a paywall.)

Nice

‘What we end up with is an extraordinary hybrid: a scholarly reflection and a flesh-and-blood narrative. Precisely how Beard pulls this off will take several readings. However he does it, it works. The novel is seamless; as gripping as a thriller and endlessly thought-provoking. Not only does the novel ask central questions about belief and theology, it portrays a time which feels very real and very similar to our own … Surprising, spellbinding, witty and utterly original.’ Chris Dolan, The Sunday Herald, Scotland

‘… ultimately it is the narrative voice – cultivated, wry, yet not too knowing to sustain a note of wonder – that makes this novel so compelling and strange.’ Edmund Gordon, The Sunday Times

‘… this is a thoughtful, enjoyable book.’ Simon Baker, The Spectator

‘… this clever and original book keeps the reader guessing until the death – and beyond.’ Adrian Turpin, Financial Times

‘Richard Beard’s new novel is a fascinating mixture of fiction and academic essay, a re-imagination of the life of Lazarus from youth to resurrection and beyond. Using biblical sources and other, less orthodox ones, Beard weaves a compelling portrait of first-century Israel.’ unsigned, Catholic Herald

‘… the work succeeds because, overall, Beard is to be taken seriously. He can stir emotion quickly and simply … his essayistic digressions temper the mythic luminosity of his subject, contributing to the poignancy of his imagined “biography”‘ Laurence Scott, The Times Literary Supplement

‘.. this strange, compelling and inventive book. … a challenging, thoughtful read, even for a die-hard heathen.’ Stacia Briggs, Eastern Daily Press.

‘… a thoroughly entertaining elaboration of the miraculous Lazarus’s life. Lazarus Is Dead is no ordinary novel: it is a brilliant, genre bending retelling and subversion of one of the oldest, most sensational stories in the western canon.’ Sara Keating, Sunday Business Post (Ireland)

Not nice

‘There are risks, however, in breaking the “vivid and continuous dream” of fiction, in positioning the reader outside the central story and undermining our faith in it, and here it does not pay sufficient dividends. The dialogue between different texts is dry, lacking in drama or intellectual punch …’ Tom Lee, Observer

‘Hmmm. Unconvincing, but as well made as a brick can be without straw.’ Kate Saunders, The Times

Some contradictory pairs:

Structure:

‘Lazarus is Dead is described on the jacket as ‘genre-bending’, which is accurate, since it combines literary fiction with a highly speculative form of biography-cum-history.’ Spectator

‘Beard’s tale of second chances is both a novel and, to some extent, a cultural history of the Lazarus figure. This is hardly as “genre-bending” as the publishers suggest.’ FT

Language:

‘It took me time to warm to this book with its spare prose and matter-of-fact turn of phrase…’ Eastern Daily Press

‘Beard writes with sharp clarity; short, unadorned sentences that contain an unforced, incisive wit.’ Sunday Business Post

In a hurry

One-word extracts: ‘Stimulating’ Sunday Times, ‘Impressive’ FT, ‘Beautiful’ EDP, ‘Imaginative’ Observer,’Well-made’ The Times, ‘Enjoyable’ Spectator, ‘Cinematic’ TLS, ‘Spellbinding’ Sunday Herald

Or not: ’Detached’ FT, ‘Dry’ EDP, ‘Dry’ Observer, ‘Glib,’ TLS, ‘Clogged’ Spectator, ‘Hmmm’ Times

That’s before we even get to the book blogs. I’ll come back to these, but the non-aligned critics have more space and can produce more considered writing than some of the hurried squibs in broadsheets (‘Hmmm’ is a limited critical term).

I enjoyed the thoughtful reviews of Lazarus on dovegreyreader, Just William’s Luck, The Bookbag and a full-colour illustrated piece at James Russell on the Web

Are you a Christian?

There was an extract from Lazarus is Dead in the July edition of Prospect magazine. When the magazine decided to run the extract this was their first question (as it had been the first question of an American publisher): are you a Christian? Admittedly, this story is a departure for me. The book is set in first-century Israel and although the structure is unusual (as readers of the earlier novels might expect) the book really is set in first-century Israel. Really. Most of it.

The novel tells the story of how the bible-character Lazarus became ill, and his first death is at the physical centre of the book; the second half tells the story of what happens after he comes back to life.

Lazarus is Dead is not a satire, even though my appearance at the Edinburgh Book Festival is listed in the print catalogue as a Religious Spoof – ‘God won’t like what he sees.’ I’m not so sure about that, but I am sure that a re-imagined bible story is difficult to classify, and can engender a kind of panic. The default assumption is that if a modern novelist re-writes a Christian story he must be mostly against. Then the book gets read, and the question changes. Am I a Christian?

I shall probably be asked this question again, so thought I’d try to work out an answer here on the blog. The advantage of doing it here, of course, is that I can come back and edit whenever I change my mind.

Most recently, the Sunday Herald reviewer didn’t even ask. ‘Beard is not himself a believer,’ Chris Dolan decides, ‘but he enriches the dull, simplistic debate between bishops and imams and Dawkins and co.’ I was very glad to read this, as it was part of what I wanted to do (and Dolan is excellent on the ‘point’ of the book.) However, I don’t quite believe that I’m not a believer. So what am I? The more I write the more I realise I’ve done a lot of thinking before now that might once again be relevant.

I looked this up from Dry Bones, a description of a character soon after he leaves University. His Dad is a vicar:

‘Every evening he drove home from the city in his roadster with electric everything to a kitchen with a glass kettle, and by his second year in London, eating Japanese noodles on expenses, he earned five times as much as a vicar after twenty years on apologetics and paste sandwiches. Mason Senior wrestled with the divine secrets of existence. Tom Mason Junior bought from the bottom and sold at the top. Thine is the glory, Tom. Our Dad still had his uses: an Anglican vicar in the family could be good value, especially at dinner parties with Bachelors of Arts and Sciences, where not one highly paid graduate under the age of forty had progressed much further than not believing in god.’

This is what I believed some time ago (Dry Bones came out in 2004) and is what I believe now. Everyone should get to the stage of not believing in god. That’s the easy part, and also not the end of it.

Lazarus and the Power of Seven

My new novel, Lazarus is Dead, is due out on August 18. That’s seven years since Dry Bones. What have I been doing? The non-fiction, the stories, the living. But it’s not living that eats up the time, it’s writing novels.

In 2004, when Dry Bones came out, Harvill Secker was Secker and Warburg, and I didn’t have a website. This time round there are suddenly things to do. I should add something about Lazarus to the books pages here, and I will. I should keep track of what Harvill Secker are doing over at Vauxhall Bridge Road.

This is what they’re doing first. The publication of Lazarus is seven weeks away, and once a week until then the Vintage website will post a short reading from Lazarus is Dead as a countdown to publication day. Seven is a significant number in the story of Lazarus, and so it is in Lazarus is Dead. I’ve always been a fan of number-plots, ever since X 20, and the gospel of John, in which the story of Lazarus is first told, has a plot that calibrates to the number seven. There are seven miracles, seven signs that measure the journey of Jesus from provincial carpenter to capital Messiah.

Seven is a great number. In fact, god himself is a fan, the creator of the seven-day week and the seven pillars of wisdom, the seven branches of the menorah, the seven archangels and the seven vengeances of the murder of Cain. God’s deputy, Shakespeare, has seven ages of man because seven is a number for stories, for the seven voyages of Sinbad and the seven wives of Bluebeard (no relation). Unfortunately, seven is a rounded number, and should always be approached with caution. There are seven sins for every seven virtues, and only rarely seven brides for each of the seven brothers.

And psychologically, seven is approximately the number of different thoughts we can hold in our short-time memories at any one time, a fact I owe to the addictive Book of Numbers (1997) by the IM chess-player William Hartston. Which means I’ve now forgotten everything except where I started, which is that Random House are counting down here from the number seven. Six more weeks to go.

Book Covers

Lazarus is Reviewed

Are you a Christian?

Lazarus and the Power of Seven

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