I am slowly working my way through all of Gollancz’s SF Masterworks series, in no particular order (much as the books are numbered and were published in no particular order, I was told by the Gollancz team). I picked Behold the Man up earlier than many of the other masterworks due to its short length, because it was about time travel and because it looked like it had a very interesting take on both time travel and on religion. This is the first Moorcock book that I have ever read (there’s another in the SF Masterworks series and another in the Fantasy Masterworks series that I’m yet to tackle) and I’ve come away considerably impressed.
Behold the Man uses what has since become a well known and perhaps clichéd time-travel plot of a man going back in time to witness a particular event and then it ending up that he plays a major role in bringing about that event through his actions in the past; a self-fulfilling paradox. Here, this is exercised to the fullest, with the novel’s protagonist Karl Glogauer going back to 29AD in order to witness Jesus and his crucifixion and the narrative working out so that he eventually becomes the Jesus that Christianity reveres (which the book’s blurb makes no attempt to hide, so I do not feel like I am spoiling anything here).
What I was expecting, then, was a neatly constructed time-travel narrative, of the kind we are now used to, but Moorcock delivers so much more. The book is both a psychological portrait of a broken and troubled man, and it also delves into what lies at the core of religion and comes out with some interesting things to say. Glogauer is both a compelling character who we can sympathise with and yet at the same time incredibly unlikable – a difficult trick to pull off. The flashbacks of his life before time travel are full of instances of homosexuality, strange lusts intertwined with religion, and many occasions of him driving women away due to his self-diagnosed neurosis and self-loathing.
The frequent debates about the nature of religion that occur between him and one woman, Monica, are stimulating, and as the novel nears its end some interesting conclusions are drawn by Glogauer. It debunks religion in general, in a way, and shows often how it is simply the product of people hearing what they want to hear and seeing what they want to see.
Throughout the text are scattered extracts from the bible which serve to highlight the exact role that Glogauer knows he must play. Knowing that Glogauer is Jesus, the placement and choice of these extracts also cleverly forces us to look at them in a new and different way; in light of Glogauer’s knowledge of the future and his strong will to fulfil Jesus’s role, the often riddle-like phrases Jesus speaks in the bible seem to make so much more sense here.
One aim of the SF Masterworks series is to bring people’s attention to certain science fiction masterpieces that have been forgotten over time by many and subsequently overlooked. This text is certainly one of those; when you think of Michael Moorcock, most think of certain of his other works and are completely unaware of this book. This is the best book about time-travel that I have read so far, and one from a very talented writer. I realise that this is a book unlike typical Moorcock, but it has made me look forward to reading more of his work nonetheless.
8/10
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