PositiveLiterary ReviewThe sense of a writer finding material worth riffing on never quite goes away, but there is more to it than that: in their needling, selfish, dry-as-dust way, these three books are works of cumulative power and never less than consistent interest ... Like the two novels that preceded it, The Death of Jesus is difficult to get a handle on ... But the sense of half knowing what is happening, of seeing the story we recognise in the shadows of the story we are being told, accompanies this book just as much as the others ... What is interesting about these books, however, is not this surface level of event, but the environment in which the events are bedded. The trilogy is a work of speculative fiction, geared towards answering a particular question: what kind of Christ might grow from the Enlightenment? In other words, if a figure like Jesus were to appear in a world that was like ours, had developed in exactly the same way as ours had but without Christianity, what religion would he give us? ... an effective and fascinating piece of fiction. Whether you think it has any value beyond the paradoxes and parallels it gives us, or is simply further proof that the reason Coetzee and Coelho are shelved alongside one another in libraries is not simple alphabetical coincidence, will depend on your tolerance for this mode of writing.
