Bored and betrayed by Judas

Fiction:Nothing is sacred, not even, judging by New Zealander CK Stead's unconvincing new novel, the story of Jesus Christ.

This is the story according to Judas, the man whom Christianity has always regarded as the ultimate betrayer, the bogus follower who sealed his leader's fate in the cruellest parody of love - a false kiss. Well, so much for the accepted view of how it all happened - Stead has decided to upend the official version of what is a 2,000-year-old drama, in a novel that may outrage, irritate, or simply fail to convince.

Either way, Stead, a distinguished academic, critic, novelist and author of a wonderful novel, The Secret Life of Modernism (2002), has done to Christian belief more or less what Salman Rushdie did to Islam. Yet whereas Rushdie earned a death sentence, Stead is being praised by some reviewers for his daring. What a funny old world we live in.

If history and Christian belief has tended to see Judas as the real villain behind the crucifixion of Christ, Stead has decided otherwise. Far from having taken 30 pieces of silver and then hanged himself from remorse on a lonely fig tree, Stead's Judas merely left town, changed his name and became someone else. Some 40 years having passed since events that night in a garden called Gethsemane, Judas has reached the age of 70, is now known as Idas of Sidon and has raised Greek children with his second wife, also Greek, who alas died some three years before this narrative begins.

Judas, or Idas as he has come to be known, is a calm character who has lived well. He does not appear to suffer from guilt, because his only sin was one of non-belief. He tells us he knew Jesus from the time they were both six or seven years old. "His father was a carpenter and mine was a successful trader, so there was a social divide between us." Both boys were educated by the same tutor, Andreas, who considered the young Jesus to be a genius.

Fiction writers can do as they please, there are no rules - the young Adolf Hitler no doubt collected pressed flowers and everyone knows how much he loved his dog, even after the Führer had ordered the death of six million Jews, but from very early on My Name Was Judas falls numbingly flat. Some stories really don't lend themselves too easily to subversive retellings and Stead surprisingly makes the fatal mistake of not paying sufficient attention to atmosphere and tone - this most familiar of stories simply sounds too modern. Not even the setting confers a sense of Biblical times.

Throughout this bizarrely passionless book, the narrator sounds more like a present-day gangland leader trying to appear vexed about his reputation among the local police force than a man whose name has become synonymous with betrayal throughout the western world.

No one hoping to set the record straight would be so conversational, so calm, so politely rational, and most unforgivably of all, so boring - if only Stead had presented Judas as a maligned madman outraged by his poor press. Of course, there always has to be a villain, but Stead and the reader might have had far more fun had he decided to vindicate Lucifer - although Milton already did that. . . Judas works hard at presenting Jesus as a real boy - good-looking, clever, a natural leader, a bit of a bully. By chapter three, our avuncular narrator recalls: "As a boy there were few things I enjoyed more than going to the house of Jesus and his family." Judas was an only child but Stead's Jesus had many brothers and sisters and a mother called Mary who is described as "weird".

Jesus is presented as a good-looking charmer with a flair for public speaking and the gift of healing, who, by the way, ran away from the mother he despises. Even allowing for fiction's poetic licence, the characterisation of Mary as a "prig" will offend; she is also cold and almost menacing. The disciples appear as brainless sheep who really had nothing better to do. As for Judas, his first wife had died and his father had never forgiven him for marrying her in the first place, so he needed somewhere to go and following Jesus passed the time.

As a study of a damaged friendship it never quite works, and Jesus emerges like a wayward, increasingly cocky revolutionary who stepped on one toe too many - which perhaps he did, but for all the effort Judas goes to attempting to tell us what really happened, Stead must battle the weight of history as well as the dangerously modern tone of the narrative, and all in a story that is so well known.

Speculation is usually fascinating, and this could have been an engaging if iconoclastic tale, particularly had Stead applied his considerable talents to the project. Yet it never achieves the mystery, allure and feel for period evoked by, for example, the British writer Jim Crace in Quarantine (1997), an exciting excursion into Judaean history and/or myth.

Instead, My Name Was Judas is cold, formal, a bit too deadpan, even lazy, and never as clever a jaunt as Stead may have intended it to be for believers and non-believers alike.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish TimesFiction

My Name Was JudasBy CK Stead Harvill Secker, 244pp. £16.99