Previously: Forget The Da Vinci Code! Not only does the 2006 novel The Expected One tell the True Truth™, but its author trumps Dan Brown on its subject matter: Kathleen McGowan (that’s her in the pic) claims she descends from Mary Magdalene and her husband, Jesus Christ…
Yep, I’ll admit it: I bought this book. I saw the cover, read the back and inside front flap, and paid hard-earned cash for it. It wasn’t until I got home that I read the back inside flap and the introductory material, and realized I’d been had: what had caught my eye as a historical thriller was actually propaganda for New Age woo. In the afterword McGowan described herself as a descendant of the Magdalene and strongly hinted that she is also the “Expected One” of her book’s title, a female messiah destined to bring Jesus and his wife’s True Message™ to the world.
My first impulse was to turn right around and return this bit of fictional non-fiction to the store, but the author’s insistence on her journalistic and research integrity and training, and her realizations about historical record and investigative rigor, persuaded me to go ahead, read the book, and judge for myself. Maybe I would be pleasantly surprised by her knowledge, narrative, or hopefully both, despite her rather juvenile, short-sighted complaint that our perception of history is biased by what is written about it (which would mean that we should disregard everything she writes, even the parts she claims are not fiction – but I digress).
So overall, what did I find in TEO?
Disappointingly, a stock plot with stock characters and most of the twists turned to the protagonist’s advantage, thus cheating the reader of the sense of danger and suspense that are the minimum elements we expect and should receive in a work described and marketed as a “thriller.” There’s so much exposition it’s practically all exposition, and at least I could see the Big Reveal coming a mile away.
After the author-protagonist makes such a big deal out of how important it is to her to travel to, explore, and experience for herself the actual geographical locations of the historical events about which she writes, her scarcity of description, especially of landscape, constituted another let-down. We know that the sites she visits move her mostly because she tells us they do, not because she shows us their power in so moving her.
Her version of the Magdalene-as-Jesus’-wife cult is the cotton-candy-sweet, marshmallow-light, feather-weight fluff that only allows vanilla sex between attractive, noble men and women who always form long-term relationships (although our heroine’s romantic male lead is a manly man with a womanizing reputation who nevertheless actually “respects” her) a la Harlequin-romance-soul mates-meet-at-long-last. Villains vary from good ol’ boy-type male chauvinist pigs who secretly hate even the women they marry to outright misogynists with extreme celibate habits.
No room for swingin’ singles or God forbid, gays! in this black-vs.-white cartoon worldview – certainly no Liliths, Amazons, or Killer Queens. The persecuted, pacifistic, peaceful, perfect-wife-and-mother, preaching, forgiving, highly educated, all-suffering – and, of course, breathtakingly beautiful – Magdalene is held up as the be-all and end-all model for women.
So now we know what you think of the story and characters, Eve, but what about the much-hyped historical accuracy and revelations the novel contains as a result of the 20 years of intensive, in-depth research McGowan tells us she has conducted?
All I can say is that I didn’t see them.
She repeats the usual New Age claims such as “we know Mary Magdalene came to southern France after Jesus was crucified” without even mentioning the source, a legend that didn’t even spring up in the south of that country until the Middle Ages. She cobbles these claims together with myths, folklore, and what she insists is oral tradition – all of which she considers far more accurate than primary, proven and yes, written sources. Most of this stuff I could find on my own by Googling and choosing the most fantastical and unsubstantiated versions that came up in my search – hardly impressive results.
As for her assertion that writings can’t be trusted to accurately and objectively depict history, I hate to inform her that you can trust oral tradition even less. They can often contradict or complement each other, but the bottom line is that reputable, ethical historians, researchers, and scholars are very well aware of this and by and large know how to identify, approach, interpret, and implement the sources available to them. In contrast, pitchers of woo – like, sadly, Ms. McGowan herself – seem to go out of their way to excuse their lack of rigor, stringent standards, study, and quite frankly, scholarship. Her proud description of herself as the “anti-scholar” is actually a badge of shame coming from someone who claims her personal motto is “truth against the world.” There’s no justification for shoddiness and it’s a major warning that shouts, “Not to be taken seriously!”
But perhaps my biggest beef with her so-called “research” is what she tries to pass off as “art history.” When it comes to art, everyone is entitled to their opinion, of course, but there’s a big difference between one’s own reaction to a piece and the documented, substantiated facts behind it. McGowan often seems to imply that scholarship is, quite frankly, to be totally thrown out the window in favor of willful ignorance and confirmation bias, and while I personally don’t like Picasso, for instance, it would be short-sighted and simplistic of me to refuse to acknowledge his work, influence, and contribution to art in general.
Warning: Spoiler Ahead.
John the Baptist as the Magdalene’s first husband (yup, Jesus was not her first!) – oh, boy. Now this is pure fiction. If she was open and honest about it being the creation of her writer’s mind, I could even respect her story about getting the idea for it from the frequent paintings showing the Magdalene with a skull (a.k.a. John’s severed head); those are the flights of fancy and human imagination that lead to story-telling. But instead, she has to go and taint it with this propagandistic overlay of having to couch it in fictional terms because of its being actual truth/reality – that I can’t stand. Be sincere; admit your “supernatural vision” was really a flash of novelistic inspiration; this woo is just so disingenuous – and unworthy of anyone except a person suffering from delusions of grandeur and/or a messianic complex.
Finally, a word about her motives: in my opinion, totally suspect. First she makes her extraordinary claim, then not only does she play a game of refusing to provide the necessary extraordinary evidence, but she also insists with what smacks of false modesty that she would hate for her book – or herself – to become famous on the basis of that same unproven claim. Then why make it in the first place? Why not let the novel stand on its own and keep yourself as much out of it as possible?
Probable answer: because the “lady protests too much, methinks;” her fantastical, unsubstantiated claim is her main selling point.
