Review copy from Netgalley.

HIM by Geoff Ryman (2023)

<blockquote>There was one cure for grief. You see the body; you mourn.</blockquote>

This is mostly a fairly straightforward retelling of the Christian Incarnation with Jesus as a transgender man, if by "straightforward" you mean almost anything but straight. I had been expecting, I suppose, something more like James Morrow's <i>Only Begotten Daughter</i>, which combines an agonizing Christ retelling with extreme satire; but there is no satire here, and no winking at the audience.

Maryam, knowing she is pregnant, maneuvers her aristocratic uncle into arranging her marriage to the political dissident Yosef, a sweet-natured and asexual radical; she is open about the nature of her pregnancy but unsurprised when her uncle concludes she is delusional or lying. (Ryman does not leave the reader in any doubt; the novel is clear throughout about the reality of divine intervention in this world. Though "intervention" is too mild a world: Miracles are deformations, not discrete changes but profound and disturbing reorganizations of the entire universe.)

Maryam and Yosef retreat to backwater Nazareth, where Maryam gives birth to a child she assumes is a daughter; the child, from the very beginning, has an adult or even supernatural awareness and understanding of the world. There is a lot about the internecine politics of Roman-occupied Judaea, but very scanty exposition; maybe it makes more sense to Christians, or maybe just to historians of the period.

Yosef preaches the equality of the sexes and the desirability of abstinence (the latter, honestly, is probably much more troubling by the tenets of traditional Judaism); when he and Maryam conceive more children later, it is through primitive artificial insemination rather than intercourse. Maryam, meanwhile, wants a daughter who will give women access to religious participation and all the power and glory that entails; she is infuriated to the point of abuse by the child's insistence that he is male, that he has taken the name of Yehushua after a dead friend, that he
will be a carpenter instead of a scholar or preacher. Even once Yosef intervenes to save the child, Maryam struggles against Yehush and dehumanizes him; for decades she thinks of him as "it" rather than "he".

What reconciles them is time and a shared rejection of the earthly concerns of Nazareth social climbers. Maryam and Yehush are indeed alike: passionate, obdurate, and single-minded to the point of tunnel vision. God, Yehush eventually attempts to explain, needs to "learn about pain":

<blockquote>He paused. “I need to change God.”

Maryam felt a calm, but a calm that restrained something that swelled within her. “God cannot be changed.”

“It’s people who can’t be changed. They live lives like dragonflies, all planned for them and over with before they can think. No. It’s God who must change. God must learn.”

“God.” Maryam was not at all bewildered. She almost felt as though the words had come out of his mouth only moments before they would have come from hers. “God is perfect.”

“Seen as a whole, outside of time, yes. But trapped here, God is in time. Do you think a being
can be perfect if it cannot learn? Learn how to pity? Learn how to forgive?”

The Son whispered. “I can’t understand it all. But God does not have to do things in order. Here, my dying and its dying with me creates the sympathy. The forgiveness. The understanding that it is horrible to die. And what’s horrible about it is. Is that each time someone dies a part of the universe dies too. And so over time, whole peoples go – their songs, stories, wisdoms.”

“I must die. So that God lives through the death and so changes. And so God will let you all live in the spirit.”</blockquote>

Death is the impetus for change: the original Yehushua's death prompts Yehush to claim his new name and true gender; Yosef's death prompts Yehush to leave Nazareth and become a prophet; Yehush's death prompts God to create souls. It is perhaps inevitable that the book ends in the moment of a pieta, wrought however strange: not Yehush but God Itself seeking a mother's consolation.

Reviewed on my blog:

https://wrongquestions.blogspot.com/2024/01/recent-reading-him-by-geoff-ryman.html

Reviewed on my blog:

https://wrongquestions.blogspot.com/2024/01/recent-reading-him-by-geoff-ryman.html

I have reviewed Him by Geoff Ryman for book recommendation and selling site LoveReading.co.uk. I’ve chosen Him as a Liz Robinson pick of the month. See link for full review.

A retelling of the story of Jesus, with the Christ figure assigned female at birth and initially known as Avigaiyl. A friend's death in childhood triggers something in Avigaiyl, who takes his name—Yeheshua, or Yeshu—and identifies as a boy from then on. The focus of the book is mostly, though, on Yeshu's mother Maryam (Mary, in the Christian tradition). Ryman, brilliantly, sees her as an intellectual and theological radical whose marriage to the scholarly, asexual Yosef is entirely suited to her needs and wants. Maryam expects her divinely-conceived firstborn to change the world by being a woman who preaches; Yeshu's gender nonconformity troubles her for much of the book, until she visits his community of followers and realises that he is espousing thoroughly radical theology anyway. Him is at its strongest—most chilling and breathtaking—when Yeshu talks about what it's like to provide a God that has never felt anything before with its first experiences of embodiment and emotion: "It needs to know", he keeps saying; "it needs to know what it feels like." These moments are fewer and further between than I would have liked, though, and the rest of the characterisation and world-evocation feels unhelpfully distancing. I wanted to like this a lot more than I did; Ryman's earlier novel Air is excellent.

La verdad, espera algo más iconoclasta y rompedor de una nueva versión del evangelio con el Mesías nacido mujer pero autoidentificado como hombre. Pero la novela me ha dejado indiferente, que creo que es lo peor que se puede decir de un libro.

Creo que el personaje más complejo y poliédrico de la obra no es Avigayil/Yeshu si no su madre Maryam. Desde la sagrada concepción a su rechazo acérrimo a la identidad de su hijo, pasando por su estudio de las escrituras y su conocimiento de lo sagrado, es sin duda lo mejor del libro, ya que es desde su punto de vista que asistiremos a todos los acontecimientos.

En cuanto a la trama, pues ya sabemos qué va a ir pasando, porque va narrando los puntos más conocidos y en cierto modo las controversias de la vida de Jesús de Nazareth, añadiendo detalles como el exilio de José por sus disidentes ideas religiosas. El principio del libro hace que resulte muy complicado empatizar con Avigayil/Yeshu, aunque refleja muy bien la cabezonería de un niño pequeño cuando se le lleva la contraria.

El novum de ciencia ficción sobre el que se desarrolla todo el libro es bastante común, la idea de que existe un multiverso y cómo cada uno de ellos tiene su propio Salvador, que no necesariamente ha de ser un hombre.

En definitiva, una novela con la que no he conectado, seguramente porque no me he encontrado lo que esperaba.

There’s a lot of good here, but so much of it drags and the writing was just a tad too sparse and cold for me to really engage with it. It’s provocative, clever, thoughtful and will spark intriguing conversation amongst those who read it. I wanted to love it but just left me feeling a bit cold.

The concept of the multiverse has been around for a while but has absolutely burst into the popular science fiction consciousness in the last few years. Geoff Ryman takes this concept and runs with it to attempt something that some will see as miraculous and some may see as blasphemous. And that is, the idea of an alternative reality in which Jesus was born as a girl. That aside, Him plays very much along the lines of the New Testament version of Jesus from our reality.
Him opens with Maryam, who has become pregnant, she says by God. She is exiled along with Yosef, a scholar and relative of the high priest, to the small Northern town of Nazareth. There Maryam gives birth to a girl, who she names Avigail. Avigail even at a very young age seems preternaturally incisive and learned and at six, following the death of a friend, determines that she will be a boy. Despite her mother’s opposition, Avigail becomes Yeshu and goes out into the village with his brother Yakob, to apprentice as a builder. But Yeshu does not stay a builder for long, finding a calling to preach, he gathers a following around him, demonstrates his ability to perform miracles and determines to take on the authorities in Jerusalam (as it is called here).
While readers do not need to know the detailed story of Jesus, his life and miracles, it helps if only to understand what Ryman is riffing on. He mainly stays within the broad stories of the New Testament – “blessed are the meek”, the curing of the lepers, the raising of the dead – all the way through to the crucifixion. But given his starting premise and by providing the story through Maryam’s perspective, gives a different angle to well known tales. On the other hand, by telling the story in this way and keeping it within these guardrails, it is hard to know whether Ryman has really brought enough new to the story to justify this retelling. All of which serves to make Him an interesting thought experiment but not entirely successful as a novel.

This book wasn't for me. I tried to like it, but couldn't finish it.

I see how the concept can reflect more modern day living, but it just doesn't work for me.

Definitely quite strange and unique. I highly appreciate that in today's world of homogeneous fiction. I highly recommend this book.

Thank you to the publisher for providing me with an Advance copy of this thought-provoking book.

I have very mixed feelings about this one. First, here are the things that I think worked really well.:
- The premise is excellent and provides a lot of really interesting ground to explore.
- The part about the family's home life was well-drawn, and I think did a great job of showing how troublesome having a nascent Messiah in a family would be.
- The strong connections between the family and the priestly elite in Jerusalem combined with the exile storyline provided a great sense of push-and-pull that added to the narrative tension and provided a solid through-line for the whole book across the generations.
- The atmosphere surrounding the teaching gatherings was great; it captured the sense of excitement really well and I particularly enjoyed the crowds turning his teachings into songs.

But now I have to turn to the things that didn't work for me. And unfortunately, there were a lot of them:
- The use of Aramaicisms throughout felt a bit clunky; it added to the historical and social context less than I think it was intended and for me at least was more of a distraction. I was also confused at when Aramaicisms were used, when Hellenisms were used, and when an English word or nickname was provided; it felt inconsistent to me and, again, distracted from the story.
- While I think it was an interesting and certainly bold choice to play with the characters within the 'holy family', for the first half of the book, they are all made out to be very unlikable and unsympathetic. The father is a fool, the mother a harridan, the Cub totally nasty and out of control, the first brother as an incestuous obsessive, and the first sister as sanctimonious and bitter. (And I actually liked her best of them all for much of it.) The second half of the book certainly pulled back a lot of that, but it was a really rough and unpleasant journey for me.
- I liked the idea of a gender-bent Jesus figure, but I wish the book had had a clearer perspective about it. Even by the end, I wasn't sure whether it was a trans man, a woman cross-dressing to open doors of respectability, or (as is suggested at the end) an intersex individual. Each of those options could have allowed for some interesting paths, but by not overtly choosing one, it didn't seem to go anywhere. I wasn't even sure what the point of it was in the end.

I'll stop there, but suffice it to say, this didn't work as well for me as I'd have liked. As someone who has formally studied early Christianity and Second Temple Judaism and wrestled with issues of gender and sexuality therein for over two decades now, there were a lot of interesting things the author could have done here, and sadly, I didn’t feel like he did any of them. I've read a number of literary reimaginings of the Jesus story and, compared to many of the others, this felt unnecessary.

Closer to the publication date, I will post the following guarded review on my bookstagram:

To intentionally tackle such a well-known set of characters and stories as this did, you really need to know what you’re doing and why you’re doing it, and I unfortunately left this unconvinced the author did. As someone who has formally studied early Christianity and Second Temple Judaism, and wrestled with issues of gender and sexuality therein, for well over two decades now, there are so many interesting and compelling places the author could have gone with this, and he just didn't. It’s not bad. It’s just disappointing: A book that takes some big swings, but, for this reader at least, didn't really connect. (Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for providing me with an Advance Review Copy of this thought-provoking book.)
Rating: 3/5

On the face of it, this book seemed like it was going to be provocative - a girl born to Maryam in Nazareth who, as she grows up, identifies not only as a boy but as the Son of God in this universe in the multiverse- but it actually wasn’t, it was beautiful. I absolutely loved the idea that every universe in the multiverse has a Saviour as each universe needs saving, so why shouldn’t each Saviour represent all of the people? A Saviour who’s a man, a Saviour who’s a woman, a Saviour who’s trans? Mostly though, I loved Maryam. It’s touching and heartbreaking to follow her story as she not only has to wrap her head around the gender identity of her child, but also struggle with God and the sacrifice of her child. It’s tender. Thanks Netgalley.

In HIM, Geoff Ryman presents a daring and thought-provoking reimagining of the life of Jesus Christ. Set in a first-century Palestine where miracles are commonplace, the novel tells the story of Avigayil, a girl born into a humble family in Nazareth. From a young age, Avigayil exhibits extraordinary abilities, and as she grows older, she comes to believe that she is destined for a greater purpose.

Ryman's depiction of Avigayil is both nuanced and compelling. She is a complex and conflicted character, struggling to reconcile her own identity with the expectations placed upon her by society and by her own faith. As she embraces her role as Yeshua, a man who can heal the sick and perform other miracles, Avigayil must also contend with the political and religious forces that seek to control her.

HIM is a novel that challenges readers to reconsider their assumptions about the nature of faith, divinity, and the human condition. Ryman's prose is both lyrical and evocative, and his characters are richly drawn. The novel is sure to spark debate and discussion, and it will stay with readers long after they have finished the last page.

God, if you're a believer, is all seeing and all knowing. So, the idea of there being a multiverse, God being aware of it and sending versions of his child to each of the Earths within is an interesting concept. Why shouldn't everyone have a God, or Earthly representative, who reflects them whether that be male, female, gay, trans or other? I'm not religious myself (I was brought up Christian, but outgrew it.), but I can see how this idea and this version in particular, a trans child of God, could cause offence to some of faith. While it's an interesting idea it ultimately didn't work for me. I found it hard to relate to and care about Avigayil/Yehush, the journey they take and its inevitable end. I found their mother, Maryam, and their struggle with their child's sexual identity a more compelling character, but it's a big problem when you don't find yourself caring about the focal character.

Thanks to Angry Robot and NetGalley for the opportunity to read an advanced copy.

As a person of faith I thought that I would have problems reading this book and find it challenging or even offensive. Not at all, it was a sensitive book and made me think very much on the issues of gender, the meaning of faith and understanding God. It was a great read, very familiar in places (well it is a reimagining of the New Testament and the life of Jesus Christ) and the end was beautiful. A book that will stay with me for a long time.

Very dry prose, but the biggest problem is the formatting issues with the arc. Line breaks at random make this unreadable for me.