Reviews
'Flip chart of most impressive comebacks of all time. James Frey is Number 6 with Bright Shiny Morning, after: Jesus, Burberry, Muhammad Ali, Winston Churchill, Elvis.', Frey's execution is fab . . . a rolling, riveting headlong novel; one that packs an emotional punch yet never quite loses a little drollness about the nature of the project . . .This is a wonderful book, which one picks up with enthusiasm and puts down with reluctance. It bursts with narrative drive, Cult American author James Frey's new novel is both a work of art and a bombshell hurled at the religious right . . . This book is very good indeed. The story is told through the mouths and eyes of the Messiah's family, his girlfriends, a rabbi, a priest, a federal investigator, all contributing to a picture which is weirdly believable, often extremely moving and sometimes funny . . .Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant: every page is great., Exhilarating . . . It grabs you by the throat. The sheer narrative energy takes your breath away. There is an incessant, almost capricious sense of danger in his sentences - a feeling that he is not going to let you relax, that he could take you anywhere at any time . . . Frey is a fantastically persuasive storyteller and it is hard not to be moved by all these witnesses - some of them barely more than sketches, but all somewhere convincingly realised, and united by this one, life-transforming experience. Ultimately, however, Frey's biggest achievement is the character of Ben. We only ever see him through the eyes of others, yet this 'ordinary white boy' comes to seem so palpably present, so deeply alive, that the novel's final and inevitable climax feels quite brutal, like a real-life loss, The novel itself is compelling as both a thriller and a provocative riposte to religious orthodoxies. Fictions of this kind operate an unusual kind of suspense, in which the main tension is not what might happen but whether certain expected events still will. As a novel rather than theology, though, The Final Testament of the Holy Bible is impressively done, the alternating testimonies distinctively voiced and the twists on the gospel versions nicely judged. The repentant sinner of non-fiction proves to suit fiction
