Glenn Russell's Reviews > Behold the Man

Oh, those New Wave SF novels written in the 60s and 70s - experimental, boundary pushing and out-and-out weird. We can think of such classics as The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K. Dick, The Crystal World by J.G. Ballard, Camp Concentration by Thomas M. Disch and Inverted World by Christopher Priest. Michael Moorcock's 1969 Behold the Man is right up there, a 110-pager dripping with flaky, mind-bending weirdness, published as part of the SF Masterworks series - and for good reason.

However, please be forewarned - Behold the Man comes with two flashing red warning lights:

The first: similar to The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross (Jesus was an hallucinogenic mushroom) and The Passover Plot (a regular human schemes to be taken for the messiah), Michael Moorcock's book could be judged by those of the Christian faith as either offensive and in bad taste or as down right blasphemy.

The second: assuming a reader is familiar with the story of Jesus, the novel's unfolding drama is telegraphed in the first pages. Thus, for any reviewer, avoiding spoilers is next to impossible. So, if you would like to read Behold the Man prior to reading my spoiler-heavy review, go to the following website: Moorcock, Michael - Behold the Man - GEOCITIES.ws.

For me, Behold the Man is a provocative, highly philosophical exploration of the many dimensions of myth, religion and history, all within the context of one of the craziest bits of time travel ever imagined. Thank you, Michael Moorcock! Count me in as a new fan.

We're in 1970 and the tale centers around a Londoner by the name of Karl Glogauer who isn't exactly a happy-go-lucky kind of guy. Sure, he runs an occult bookshop he inherited from his parents and has a girlfriend, Monica, ten years his senior, but this sweetie who's a social worker with a background in psychology doesn't hesitate to point out his many shortcomings: he's overly emotional, indecisive, quick to anger, but above all else, Karl is masochistic with a messiah complex and puts way too much stock in Jungian psychology. And, to top it off, Karl is a Jew obsessed with Jesus and Christianity.

Karl and Monica bicker incessantly. Karl tells Monica he needs God. He also maintains there's great truth in myth, as Jung well knew, and religion is an expression of myth. But as a spokesperson for science and reason, Monica counters: religion is born out of fear and without fear, religion will die. Poor, poor, Karl. He has to admit "This age of reason has no place for me. It will kill me in the end." Famous last words, Karl, my boy.

Karl invites a Jungian discussion group to meet once a week in his occult bookshop. At the end of one of these evening meetings, a key member, rich, eccentric Sir James Headington, informs Karl confidentially that he's invented a time machine. "Karl went down to Banbury the next day. The same day he left 1970 and arrived in 28 A.D." That's it, no further explanation or details provided - the softest of the soft SF.

Karl finds himself southeast of Jerusalem, near the Dead Sea, among the Essenes, a mystical, acetic, peaceful Jewish sect. Karl reckons his arrival in his egg-shaped time machine must have struck the Essenes as truly extraordinary and miraculous but being a sect of hallucinating visionaries, they accepted it in stride. Anyway, he's thankful the Essenes peeled off his spacesuit and have taken him in.

No long thereafter, John the Baptist is on the scene. It bears mentioning, Michael Moorcock folds in passages from the Bible that undergird the various happenings in Karl's time travel. Events move apace until John wants to present Karl as the messiah. Karl agrees on the condition that John and the Essenes take him to where he landed (at this point Karl is thinking in terms of his return voyage). After all, he only wanted to travel back to this time and place to get a feel for what it would be like to live during the age of religion and among people of strong faith.

Alas, things take a decidedly different turn. Most especially when Karl, half-starved and wide-eyed, to all appearances a half-mad prophet, eventually journeys to Nazareth to meet the son of Joseph and Mary, to come face to face with Jesus.

But then the shock: "The madman, the prophet, Karl Glogauer, the time-traveler, the neurotic psychiatrist manque, the searcher for meaning, the masochist, the man with a death-wish and the messiah-complex, the anachronism, made his way into the synagogue gasping for breath. He had seen the man he had sought. He had seen Jesus, the son of Joseph and Mary. He had seen a man he recognized without any doubt as a congenital imbecile."

At this point Karl knows he must make a critical decision. After all, he would be bringing a myth to life, not changing history so much as infusing more depth and substance into history. And as Monica was always in the habit of telling him, he lived with unresolved obsessions and had an abnormal messiah complex.

As the saying goes, the rest is history.


British author Michael Moorcock, born 1939

"The time machine was a sphere full of milky fluid in which the traveler floated, enclosed in a rubber suit, breathing through a mask attached to a hose leading to the wall of the machine. The sphere cracked as it landed and the fluid spilled into the dust and was soaked up. Instinctively, Glogauer curled himself into a ball as the level of the liquid fell and he sank to the yielding plastic of the sphere's inner lining. The instruments, cryptographic, unconventional, were still and silent. The sphere shifted and rolled as the last of the liquid dripped from the great gash in its side." - Michael Moorcock, Behold the Man