The Gorton Gospel
Geoff Smith
Foreshore Publishing £9.50*
(978-1-73939-493-6)
*available from foreshorepublishing.com
THE memoir Christ Stopped at Eboli, by the writer, activist, and doctor Carlo Levi, describes life in one of the poorest regions of Italy in the 1930s. The people of Lucania feel that Christianity, indeed the full human experience, has passed them by.
Gorton, a working-class suburb of Manchester, is perhaps something of a British equivalent of Lucania. What if Jesus had not stopped short of there, but actually came from there? What good could come from Gorton? And would the prophet really be not without honour, safe in their own country?
In Geoff Smith’s second novel, after his semi-autobiographical Holy Disorder (Books, 1 March 2024), Smith reimagines the life not of a Church of England vicar, but of Jesus, incarnate as a non-binary lesbian, whose call to share the love of God with the people of the community takes them back to their hometown of Manchester, to their mother, Mary, and to Tim, the vicar who had once cast Mary and her child in the parish nativity play.
Mary’s inner monologues and reminiscences are perhaps the most moving parts of this novel, not least her encounter with a stranger on a bench, who tells her that she, whose first two children were taken into care, will have a third child, which she will be able to keep. “Didn’t ask his name. It could have been Gabriel for all I knew.”
There is something quite intriguing about this novel, about the way in which Smith reimagines familiar Gospel stories and thereby asks what the gospel is actually about and who it is for. Carpenter, the reimagined non-binary lesbian Christ, is no heroine, but a deeply human character.
The Gorton Gospel is not without nostalgia, Mary’s Mancunian doesn’t really work in written form, and some of the incidents push the boundaries of plausibility. But here is someone who dares to imagine that Christ did not stop and the Word could, indeed, become flesh even among us.
Dr Natalie K. Watson is a theologian and writer based in Peterborough.
