Behold the Man.

Michael Moorcock has a huge bibliography of fantasy, science fiction, and some literary fiction, while also writing lyrics and even singing on a couple of tracks for bands like Hawkwind and Blue Öyster Cult, and I’d never heard of him until I came across one of his books in the London bookstore Hatchard’s in August. Moorcock won the Nebula Award for Best Novella for Behold the Man, which plays with a small but interesting conceit: A time traveler goes back to the time of Jesus, only to find that the ostensible Messiah isn’t, and that John the Baptist and his followers think the time traveler might be the promised savior.

Karl Glogauer is a man adrift in his world in the early 1970s, dabbling in studying philosophy, engaging in and sabotaging various romantic relationships, never finding an actual job or calling, or anything that might anchor him in society. He ends up falling in with a mad scientist who claims to have developed a time machine, which we know actually worked – once – because Karl crash-landed in AD 28 in the device, which was damaged badly enough that there’s no hope of a return trip. Because he arrived in a strange box in a flash of light, the people who saw him think he must be supernatural, and of course word spreads that someone who might be the Adonai.

You can sort of see where the book is going early on, even though Jesus doesn’t actually appear until past the halfway point, but in this case the plot isn’t the point. I’m sure some readers would find it sacrilegious, but this is more a character study than an attack on religion. Karl is a man without a purpose, with multiple neuroses, even told by at least one of his girlfriends that he has a messiah complex. Moorcock intertwines the 1970s narrative with the Nazarene one, so you can see the character developing as you watch his reactions to the Jews of Christ’s era trying to ascertain if he is the Chosen One – and then trying to convince him that he is. Karl goes from trying to dissuade John the Baptist and other followers that he’s anyone special to becoming a peregrinator to taking deliberate steps to fulfill the events of the Bible, not out of faith or obligation, but because it gives him a sense of purpose.

Whether this novella works for you will depend on what you think of Karl, and perhaps how much  you know of either the Gospels or the works of Carl Jung. I know a bit about the former but very little of the latter, other than that he was influential early in the days of psychiatry and believed in a lot of stuff we know now as woo. The novella does subvert the hero’s journey in multiple ways, from the way that Karl knows exactly what he has to do, since it’s already been written, to the fact that he’s deceiving everybody he meets, either because he’s a narcissist, or because he believes he’s doing the right thing by fulfilling the Scriptures.

Moorcock’s prose style is very easy to read, even with the frequent time-shifting and differences in dialogue styles between the two settings, and the author doesn’t overburden the prose with background information, such as more about Jung’s beliefs. There’s a somewhat disjointed passage about Karl having a fling with an older man, which I think makes the mistake of the time period of conflating homosexuality with a clear case of abuse, that hasn’t aged well. Beyond that, it was more than good enough for me to look into more of Moorcock’s oeuvre.

Next up: Still reading Hervé Le Tellier’s The Anomaly.