"Resurrection" echoes "Da Vinci Code" but brings healing

"I think I have discovered a God that even you can believe in," writes an archaeologist to his daughter shortly before he is found dead in Cairo.

World War II has ended, the psychological toll is just beginning to be felt, and reasonable people are debating whether Dachau and Hiroshima mean that God is a useless concept. The daughter, Gemma Bastian, is a London nurse who has seen too much death; at the same time, she's lost her hardened wartime sensibility and is beginning to feel a return to the normal sensations of pain and loss.

"She sensed the same shift in others at the hospital," writes Tucker Malarkey in her engrossing if awfully familiar new novel, "Resurrection" (Riverhead Books, 374 pp., $24.95). "They were emerging from a kind of collective shock." People passing in the halls seemed to register the same questions: "Who were you before? Who were we all? Where do we go now?"

Gemma goes to Cairo, where her postwar grief is momentarily lifted by the opportunity to see what her father was doing at the Egyptian Museum. She meets her father's estranged friend, David, and becomes involved with his sons, the enigmatic Anthony and the needy Michael, who lost a leg in battle and claims, "I miss the war." He seems happiest when the 1948 Arab-Israeli war begins.

As Gemma follows her father's path, she discovers that there were once more than 30 gospels, "written by apostles who have since been forgotten." When the Church Fathers discarded all but four, just reading the others became a crime punishable by death. Her father was in the process of discovering "what in those books created so much fear."

Loosely based on the mid-1940s discovery of the Gnostic gospels at Nag Hammadi, "Resurrection" is bound to be compared with Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code." Both novels begin with a killing that appears to be faith-driven; they continue as corpses pile up, presumably as part of a coverup.

Both are filled with extraordinary claims that have been made by biblical scholars and students of the Gnostic gospels. No doubt Malarkey, like Brown, will be accused of blasphemy. Sprinkling these revelations throughout their books, the authors use the thriller format to tease readers and keep those pages turning.

Author appearance


Tucker Malarkey will read from "Resurrection," 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Elliott Bay

Book Co., 101 S. Main St., Seattle; free (206-624-6600 or www.elliottbaybook.com).

Malarkey toys with the idea that the long-suppressed Gospel of Thomas, which may have been written by Jesus' "spiritual twin," predates Matthew and Luke. Like Brown, she is fascinated by the theory that Mary Magdalene's leadership role in the early church was ultimately hidden by "a church created by men, not by God."

She claims that celibacy was considered a sin in Jesus' time, and she writes about an alternative version of the Gospel of Mark that leaves out "sexual" passages supposedly unfit for the public. Gnostic quotations sometimes begin a chapter.

The chief difference between Brown and Malarkey is the healing spiritual dimension that Malarkey brings to her story. Brown isn't interested in much more than whether Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married and produced persecuted heirs. Malarkey is more responsible than Brown about mixing fact and fiction, and her characters are less cardboard-textured.

Like Thomas Jefferson, who created his own New Testament out of the statements he thought Jesus made (while tossing out the ones that seemed to have been added later), Malarkey is far more concerned with what Jesus actually said, and why and how his message was distorted.