I could count on one hand how many Dutch authors have had more than two books published in Hungarian in recent years. Thanks to Gondolat Publishing House, Driessen now belongs to that group as well. The Pelican appeared in the Netherlands in 2017, Rivers in 2016, and God’s Father in 2012, which means that, as far as the Hungarian translations are concerned, we are walking neatly backwards in time. I am convinced that anyone who, excited by the previous two books, goes on to read this third one will also be interested in the rich and ever-expanding body of work whose remaining parts are still unavailable in Hungarian — and I do not mean this as a subtle criticism of God’s Father, as if it served only to keep expectations alive.
In one of my earlier reviews (“River in the Heights. Martin Michael Driessen: Rivers. Jelenkor, 2021/4, 449–453”), I wrote that Driessen is a true water-man, a protean figure. From work to work, the form in which he appears changes. He writes each of his books in a different style, alternating tone, settings, the ratio of seriousness to playfulness, while the whole remains distinctly recognisable — above all through the water, the vast amount of water, which appears in every possible form, colour, and state, or rather is present in his stories (not least as “firewater”). I would now add that in God’s Father this fluidity is realised within the work itself. Its elusive narrator (author) pretends merely to let himself be carried along, constantly obeying some fleeting impulse, and knowing only one rule: never to return to a place he has once visited. The reader — although they receive no confirming hint for a long time — feels from the beginning that Driessen has drawn his own portrait in the figure of God, whom he has chosen as protagonist. Both are characterised by an inexhaustibly flowing imagination in the details, and by a personal, capricious, slightly self-admiring egoism. They are hardly bound by anything — neither plan nor promise. The book’s (logical) premise is that God is not believing or religious, but neither is he a denier of God, agnostic, or atheist. He is an indifferent creature of instinct, guided solely by his occasionally revived curiosity.
It is not easy to follow the story — or God — whose strength is neither thought nor consistency. He is mildly narcissistic and self-admiring (he can think only of himself, but has never reflected on himself), not a word of his can be believed (at least when he writes, he is swept away), and — human, all too human — he cannot control his dreams, which also arise from him and reveal something of him, but which he is unwilling to face. From all this arise all kinds of amusing — truly very amusing — complications.
God creates everything in confusion, not knowing what he wants or whether he wants anything at all (outside himself, that is). If it is true, he originally created humans so that he would not be alone, to have a family — but sadly, a normal relationship is out of the question: they worship him like an idol, and he himself tends to freeze into the role of strict and wrathful God. God is lonely; he is bored. Just when he wants to rest after the six days of creation and finally settle into eternity — with his own housekeeper, an ever-expanding and beautifying home (tableware, built-in kitchen, dripping tap), habits and hobbies — a small mishap occurs. Down on earth, the air suddenly heats up, the mood grows feverish, and someone contacts him, appears to him (or in his thoughts, or in his dream). Moreover, this individual — a certain Moses — steals the Bible from his writing desk (meaning the books of Moses. Even though God clearly wrote in them: “Do not steal!”). Moses (who “could be his father”) and his people pique God’s interest. After that, God descends to earth in various disguises, takes part in several rather unedifying adventures of the Jewish people, and experiences something through which — even if only for moments — he manages for the first time to forget himself completely and behave like the lowliest of humans. When he has had enough of the many horrors, not unrelated to his earthly adventures, he considers — while reading the Bible he himself wrote — what would happen if he realised one of his earlier, marginal ideas and were born as a human, playing the Messiah. (Once, sometime at the beginning of creation or history, his eye accidentally caught the Celts gathering around Stonehenge, and he witnessed the stirring of paternal love in one of the druids. The Celts, incidentally, prove to be a complete evolutionary dead end.) He would like to be young again, to have a father — a human father — and to experience the fullness of human existence. What interests him is not so much birth, but death — the most terrible death imaginable, which he has also written in advance as part of the great role or performance. He thinks he must impose absolute amnesia upon himself for this. But, of course, God would not be God if he did not leave himself an escape route, to return to eternity at a predetermined signal; like a diver, he may pull himself up at any moment. He therefore decides not to interfere in the fate of the son, even if Jesus should stray from the path and from the role of redeemer. True, he scarcely pays attention; for example, while waiting, he often “ties off the end of the string and goes to get a beer”, meaning he focuses on his own daily life, such as feeding his dove of peace. He would only reach for Jesus if he overshot the mark, if he really happened to die — just like that. Perhaps Driessen conceived this as a metaphor for novel-writing; then it would make sense. Yet he does not follow this through (nor anything else), and theologically the whole thing is hard to interpret.
It is apparent that God is not a great reader of his own books. For although he believes he will come into the world as his own son, down on earth he is not in fact Father and Son, inseparable as both in one person, but merely a human who is connected to a higher being (or perhaps a god whose human form is only a veil? On the basis of the book this is difficult to decide, though likely the former). And the thought does not occur to him that the entire experiment or adventure might concern redemption; as I have mentioned, this dimension — sin, grace, justification or eternal death, sacrifice and love — is entirely absent from God’s thoughts and consequently from the novel — but I sense also from Driessen’s worldview. For centuries, readers of the Bible interpreted the story of redemption through the father-son relationship (or the imagery of betrothal and marriage), to understand the covenant between God and humanity. In God’s Father, however, there is no question of God giving his only begotten son as a sacrifice, nor of him wanting to adopt humanity as his biological son. This task — without having the slightest idea of it — God leaves to Joseph through his decision (of course Joseph is not God, and moreover he has several biological children, and Jesus is not an ordinary human either, but such things need hardly trouble the reader of God’s Father).
Joseph has great difficulty coming to terms with the situation that his fiancée is bearing a child not from him but from someone else, but when he slowly realises what awaits Jesus, he becomes increasingly attached to him — though the attraction is not entirely mutual — and resolves to hide him from God’s eyes, to protect him from what lies ahead. From then on, “father” and “son” take part in all kinds of adventures, although it is not entirely clear what their function is, where they lead, or whether they lead anywhere at all. Joseph wants to keep the boy safe and arm him, but in truth he must protect him mainly from himself, not only because Jesus is naïve and vulnerable and dimly aware of his mission, but because his very nature and behaviour reveal the narrow-mindedness of that selfish, possessive, overprotective fatherly love embodied by his father, who is supposed to represent universal calling and higher love and goodness… The father tries to teach the son, to prepare him for life, but in fact he is the one who must learn from him, and in the end — partly under pressure of circumstances, simply because the plot moves in that direction — he yields, he bows before him. I sometimes had the feeling that Driessen was not satisfied — not even — with this narrative strand, and therefore added the somewhat distracting but highly entertaining divine frame story, because this story has already been written before him, for example in The Road…
In God’s Father, Joseph appears as a kind of anti-Abraham. Although he is anything but the Chosen One, he nevertheless experiences the drama of formation, of growing into the role assigned to him, but unlike the great biblical figures, he does so essentially without God, without God’s presence or pressure — at most against God’s (supposed) intention. In the book, it is he who goes through all the pains and joys of a complete human life. In contrast, Jesus — in whom God is supposedly incarnated — is entirely homogeneous, translucent, empty; often he is not even conscious — just as God is (at times) above — and he experiences things that are scarcely real at all, indeed decidedly fairy-tale-like.
Yet the most enigmatic character of the book is the young John the Baptist, who realises — or rather literally stumbles upon — his calling: he must baptise, that is, as a shepherd he must lead his flock, the people, to Jesus. This John is a somewhat strange child, one his parents might be proud of for finally finding his own path, yet they do not quite know how to appreciate it. It would be foolish to demand historical accuracy from the author in depicting this spokesman and his activity, but it is worth knowing that the real — or more precisely the possible — John baptised those who had already repented, and that regular ritual immersion served only as a reminder. Driessen chose to depict him as completely solitary as well: the prophet is not “sweated out” by a community living within a specific thought-world, yearning for the promised redemption and understanding his coming and appearance in the sense of tradition — and naturally John himself does not see himself in such a way.
In the Epilogue of the novel, God is at home painting Easter eggs; he is celebrating the Resurrection, or rather his own resurrection, which appears to be nothing more to him than a pleasant memory or a successful, tried-and-true idea. Here it is as if the author slips out of God or speaks out from the story.
“Lord Adonai,” his housekeeper replied, “I’m too old for such frivolities.”
But he certainly is not.
“I am not!” God laughed.
I am not.
Old age, foolishness.