As I write this at my desk in London, down in Bath, at the brighly-lit lectern in St Michael's Without someone – one of about 400 volunteers – will be reading out a chapter from the King James Bible as part of a five-day non-stop marathon to celebrate the 400th anniversary of this monument of English prose.
It's a fundamentally secular event, though there are moments of unexpected spirituality, and it all began when, at the end of 2011, I wrote a column challenging one of the UK literary festivals to mount an anniversary reading. If Joyce fans can do this for Ulysses and Melville-ites for Moby-Dick, why shouldn't an English literary festival organise an event to mark the 400th birthday of this seminal British text?
After a bit of to-ing and fro-ing, James Runcie, director of the Bath Lit Fest, stepped up and made the commitment. And here we are.
The event was launched on the evening of Tuesday 1 March, when a group of actors led by Jonathan Pryce and his wife Kate Fahy, together with Bill Paterson and Tim Pigott-Smith, launched into Genesis. The vicar lit a five-day candle, and off we went. It's thrilling stuff. Whatever else you may think of him, when it comes to storytelling, the Almighty knows his stuff. In the first two hours we'd covered Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah's flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, the Tower of Babel and Abraham's sacrificial offering of his son Isaac.
Sitting in the church (with a changing congregation of about 150 wellwishers, gawkers and thrill-seekers) the experience was rather like sitting in on a concert of language. The majestic cadences of the KJB echoed from the lectern as a rota of readers, brilliantly organised by the festival, ploughed on through verse after verse.
The inaugural reading team went off for a meal. When we came back at about midnight, the reading was well into Exodus. By dawn, the team was approaching Deuteronomy. After a full day of reading on Wednesday, the readers were cruising through the Book of Ruth.
The experience is partly theatrical – every reader has his or her audience – partly literary, and partly inspirational. I am a decided agnostic (a classic oxymoron) but it is hard not to be stirred in some way by the cadences of this translation.
The Old Testament is a bloody chronicle of killings and battles, infidelities, rapes and treachery, presided over by a capricious and apparently brutal god, but when you sit and listen to it, hour by hour, it becomes a strange mirror to our own times. A people rising up to shake off an appressive yoke? Snap. A tyrannical king brought down by rebellious subjects? Snap. A man wreaking horrible vengeance on a helpless woman? Snap. There's nothing new under the sun - as Ecclesiastes will tell us, when we get there...
The Bath Bible Challenge ends on Saturday evening with Timothy West reading from the Book of Revelation. If you can't be there, you can monitor events via a rolling Twitter feed, but something tells me I'm going to be there to witness it. These kinds of anniversary moments are so rare.
Great story Robert, I'd be there too if I lived a bit closer.
ReplyDeletewish that I could be there to here Timothy West read that final chapter of Revelation.
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