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. 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.
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. 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. 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.
There is a depiction of one incidence of sexual child abuse.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. It was recommended to my by a Christian, however, and it doesn't seem anti-theist indeed it could be read as agnostic. I am an atheist, and so I can't imagine how a Christian (or, indeed, someone with another faith) would approach this. The characters are all realistically drawn, and there are few likeable people, least of all Glogauer himself however, as the text progresses to the end, you begin to find him admirable. It seems (to someone deeply ignorant) well researched and an original look at a reasonably familiar trope.
This is stunning book, with intense emotions and a highly intelligent look at the story of Jesus. Slowly Glogauer finds himself fulfilling a prophesy. Without wishing to give too much away, the book is stunningly irreverent to story of Christ. This intersperses the story of Glogauer arriving in the middle East in AD 29. Karl Glogauer is an anti-hero of the highest degree, his life - before an encounter with a time machine, anyway - is deeply miserable, and mostly what is detailed are a string of dysfunctional relationships. This novel is a science fiction exploration of the crucifixion, through the eyes of a Jewish refugee, who is a bullied, fatherless, intensely neurotic, Jung-obsessed and self-loathing young man growing up in London in the post-war years.
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