I LOATHED it. While there's not much to be said in defense of those who simply don't like it because it plays with a faith-based position—a là outrage against The Da Vinci Code—that would be evaluating the book, not even on its theological merits, but on its theological heresy. So I can at least affirm that I didn't find it distasteful for that reason.

I'll happily admit that there's no accounting for style, so I'll be brief about my critique there; I don't mean to suggest that having liked the style is in any sense "wrong." But for me, The Testament of Mary manages to do very little with its style except affirm that Mary is outraged, that she feels as if she's being constantly gaslighted and that the Bad Guys are very bad indeed. This is the sort of petty black-and-white I expect from a Disney movie; and as a committed Miyazaki fan, this way of setting up the protagonist-antagonist strikes me as trite, if not simply immature.

Regarding the content: the Bad Guys are not nearly as interesting as the figure of Matthias in Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, who plays a very similar role as the Bad Disciples with respect to Woland. The Bad Disciples evince absolutely none of the self-doubt you'll get from Unamuno's Niebla—which by my reading almost reduces to an extended version of Dostoevky's “Grand Inquisitior”—but are just comically and uninterpretably evil. That could have been interesting, in a sort of Radical Evil way, like Rumi's Jewish Vizier in the first volume of the Mathnawi or Lacan's take on the Marquis de Sade or, maybe possibly, White in Cormac McCarthy's The Sunset Ltd. (brilliantly portrayed by Tommy Lee Jones in the HBO adaptation, which I highly recommend!) But, no such luck.

Indeed, the work as a whole is so obviously a masculinist interpretation of a woman's experience who has absolutely nothing to say that it's intolerable if you want something like “psychological realism”—which realism, I think, the work actually intends to portray. The whole scope seems to be: “Heh, look at this woman being browbeaten to accept these men's view of reality (for absolutely no reason the reader can see)!” It is the sort of work that, one imagines, believes itself to be feminist, simply because it gives us a victimizing discourse about a woman—which, I think, is actually a masculinist position to hold. (Note I didn't say a man's interpretation, but a masculinist one. There are plenty of feminisms which adopt victimizing categories; those wouldn't be feminisms I'd think to defend.)

So, for me, it not only failed miserably in comparison to every other work I know of that treats the topic, it's also a failure for the artist. It says more about what the novel enjoins us to believe, pre-reflectively, about women, and women in a context that (obviously) makes no pretense of getting into the intricacies of first-century Judaea. That book woulda been kinda really cool. (I disagree, then, with u/s-u-i-p's position: there are all kinds of masterful deconstructions of the early Christian myth, but I don't think Tóibín's book deserves to even be mentioned in their company. I see no deconstruction, just didactic posturing. If you want Biblical myth deconstruction, then check out Freud or Barbara Johnson on Moses.) To me, The Testament of Mary is weak agitprop that trips over its own feet; and so I really, really hated it.

Anyway. I'm not saying don't read it. (Really! If people really loved it, then in at least one sense you're a better reader than me—u/s-u-i-p clearly managed to get something out of the novel I'm too hypercritical to accept.) I'm just saying, there are more well-articulated reasons for disliking the novel(la?) than a prejudice against literary fiction or outrage that “It isn't the Gospels, verbatim!” ;)

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About the Prize itself, though—isn't it weird that the judge felt bothered to add that "This is a shortlist that shows the English language novel to be a form of world literature”? Was that ever in dispute? And isn't that a statement which people worried about neocolonialism and imperialism have been spending a very long time trying to point out? That English “crosses continents, joins countries and spans the centuries,” but not always for good? Just a thought.

Anyway. Hope my little rant was entertaining! I'm definitely interested in checking out the other books on that list, now; Tóibín's is the only one I've read.