King Jesus: AND My Head! My Head!

‘I, Agabus the Decapolitan began this work at Alexandria in the ninth year of the Emperor Domitian and completed it at Rome in the thirteenth year of the same.’ With consummate ease Robert Graves lures us into the ancient past, a past in which at Alexandria culture has been gathered into one of the greatest and most vulnerable libraries ever created, and at Rome power like none before has been concentrated in one people and one man. It is into this world that King Jesus the wonder-worker is born. In siting his account at the dawn of the Christian era, Graves sloughs off the nagging, destructive controversies of later centuries and churches to get close to the smells, textures and sounds of a world out of which Jesus steps with powerful immediacy. Jesus is deeply familiar and yet strange in this book, the lost heir-at-law of Herod’s throne, a man who loves his people and their spiritual culture and whose death is a complex tragedy that affects us in every sense. King Jesus and My Head! My Head! (which evokes Elisha) though fiction, are different in kind from Graves’s more famous Claudius novels; they are also more inventive and experimental. Here religion, history and poetry nurture one another into what the editor Robert Davis calls ‘mythological fiction’, writing that ‘restores to the historical imagination of the writer and the reader the integrative patterns and symbolic resources of a genuinely mythopoeic sensibility’.