‘Akin to fusing Game
of Thrones with the Gospel of St Luke’.
It is this quote that persuaded me to pick Unholy Night off the shelf. Now there are two problems right from the
get-go here:
- Game of Thrones is the book, not the series.
- This book depicts the Flight to Egypt, something only included in the Gospel of Mathew
But these are perhaps picky details because the quote at the
top certainly portends a fun, if probably silly romp through biblical history
(not a sentence I would have imagined writing a few weeks ago...)
The story follows a criminal by the name of Balthazar whose
life basically revolves around stealing things from rich Romans and killing
those that get in his way. In many ways he is your classic anti-hero with a
sob-story background and an angry ex-girlfriend who punches him in the
face. When his latest heist goes wrong,
he finds himself the target of the Roman establishment in Judea but he keeps
slipping through their fingers. Whilst
on the run, he runs into Mary and Joseph just as they are welcoming their child
into the world. His scepticism of God’s paternity and exasperation in the
religious fundamentalism of Mary does not prevent them from teaming up to try
to escape the armies of Herod and of Pontius Pilate (who makes a dashing
supporting appearance). Their adventures
on the way borrow many aspects from other biblical stories including a plague
of locusts and betrayal on the part of a companion.
The author of this is Seth Grahame-Smith who you may
remember from such other famous works such as Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Like in these other stories, he
loves twisting popular tales by throwing in a rather ridiculous premise and
seeing how the pieces fall into place.
What gave these other stories their success was their ability to be
utterly and entirely ridiculous, not allowing you to take any of it
particularly seriously and enjoying them as a bit of light entertainment. The
problem with Unholy Night for me is
that I think it takes itself a little bit too seriously. Take the main villain. King Herod is, along with Nazis and Rupert
Murdoch, a classic villain. Everyone can
get behind hating Herod. The style of
the book would suggest that we get a rather pantomime villain and too an extent
we do. Herod is a girl-defiling,
murderous lunatic whose actions are only matched in their revoltingness by his leprous
and disease complexion but his evilness is not pantomime, it’s rather too
real. He is genuinely disturbing and
some of his parts of the book are quite hard to read. This jars rather spectacularly with some of
the swash-buckling action that occurs later which marks the book out as
something far lighter.
One of the most interesting themes in the book is the strife
between the religious devotions of Mary and Joseph, the strident atheism of
Bathazar and Herod, and the ‘magic’ of the mysterious wizard employed by the
Emperor Augustus. We see examples of all
three of these having an effect on the narrative, with the travellers seemingly
protected with divine help, but they were equally saved frequently solely by
the actions of their atheist protector from attacks planned through magical
knowledge. This presence of ‘magic’ also
rather spoiled the book for me. When
this was just a alternate telling of the Nativity story with a little murder
and rape thrown in to give it a twist (not that the Bible is free of murder and
rape) I could see the story’s raison-d’être (yes I used the French accent for
added pretension, get over it) but with it the whole thing gets a little
muddled and loses focus a little.
Overall I have to say that while I did quite enjoy reading
this book, I wouldn’t really recommend it. It is fundamentally flawed and falls
into that awkward middle-ground of too silly to be taken seriously, too serious
to be enjoyed as a bit of silly escapism.
5/10
Favourite Quotes
“Prolonging death was akin to prolonging an orgasm. The closer you could
bring the victim to the finish line without crossing it, the better it”
“Hug your children...Kiss your mothers and fathers, your brothers and sisters. Tell them how much you love them, every day. Because every day is the last day. Every light casts a shadow. And only the gods know when the darkness will find us.”
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