Outraged, the Carmelite friars for whom the painting had been commissioned refused to take possession of it. But what had they expected? The myth, of course – for preference something doleful yet uplifting in pale blue, an ascension, say – not the portrait of a drowned prostitute freshly dragged from the Tiber. Rubens, struck by the chiaroscuro, the unusual palette and the confronting realism, liked it and talked his friend the duke of Mantua into buying it. Today The Death of the Virgin hangs quietly in the Louvre, outraging nobody.

Colm Tóibín’s Testament of Mary is unlikely to outrage many of his readers, either. In the spirit of Caravaggio, Tóibín has also set up a clash between the pious myths about Mary, nicely embodied in the fifteenth-century portrait on the cover, and his portrait of a highly articulate old woman who, years before, tragically lost her high-flying son to a bunch of damaged misfits. Largely unmoved by the myths these days, we are unlikely to be incensed by the disjunction. Will we, though, be moved by the writer’s technical skills?

Caught between a Jewish religious establishment that wants her silenced, and her son’s sinister followers, who want her to embroider their own self-serving stories about what happened, Tóibín’s Mary talks to us. And for the unlettered wife of a village carpenter in Roman Galilee, she’s quite a talker. Her often poetic monologue is also cleverly crafted in such a way as not to contradict outright the Four Evangelists’ assertions about her, which are few but familiar. For example, whether or not it was the Holy Spirit who ‘came upon her’ (as Luke puts it in the King James version), blessing her with holy offspring, or her betrothed who made her pregnant in the usual way, is something she does not discuss with us. Having witnessed none of her son’s miracles except one, the turning of water into wine (surely one of his feebler wonders, although, to be fair, it was his first), she passes no judgement on them.

Mary nowhere mentions her other children, it’s true, which is odd, since the boys are mentioned by name in the New Testament, and she certainly doesn’t behave as if she thought she was the mother of the Son of God, something the angel Gabriel was utterly specific about. In fact, she seems rattled by Jesus’ ‘high-flown talk and riddles’, the ‘strange proud terms’ he uses to describe himself and his task in the world, ‘saying that he was the Son of God’. But then,  She certainly looks far from pleased in a lot of Annunciations.

It is in the interstices, however, between these scripturally documented events, that Tóibín turns his back rather mischievously on myth. And it is here that he runs into trouble. Not with his Jesus, who is superbly plausible (as is his Lazarus): a self-deluded swami figure surrounded by a swarm of manipulative malcontents and hucksters. This depiction of the authors of the four Gospels as belonging to a band of needy stammerers who were always ‘smiling to themselves’, unable to ‘look a woman in the eye’, men who either talked too much or were silent, certainly sits oddly with their actual writings. If you ignore the Gospels, it has an oddly authentic ring to it – Kipling uses almost the same vocabulary to describe fakirs and their hangers-on in the Punjab 1900 years later (‘holy men stammering gospels in strange tongues; shaken and consumed in the fires of their own zeal; dreamers, babblers, and visionaries’). The disciples belong to a time and a place. We have met men like these before.

‘It is Mary herself who is the problem.’

It is Mary herself who is the problem. In Mary, Tóibín has failed to create a character who is recognisable as anyone or anything at all – and one thing a work of fiction must do is create characters that are recognisable as something: the hero of a nineteenth-century realistic novel, the unrealistic hero of a twentieth-century socialist realist novel, the woman next door in a 1960s sitcom, the actual woman next door, a comic-book version of some historical figure, a Norse troll, a cyborg – anything, really, but something. Jesus in Jesus Christ Superstar, for instance, is the rock-opera version of a character from a passion play; Maugham’s Edward Driffield in Cakes and Ale is Thomas Hardy; Kipling’s Kim is an orientalist fantasy. Tóibín’s Mary, however, taken as a whole, is not recognisable as anybody from anywhere, and certainly not as a first-century small-town Jew.

It’s not just a matter of the anachronisms – Jesus Christ Superstar is full of anachronisms, after all; they are a mark of Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s chosen genre. All the same, Mary’s perception, 1600 years before William Harvey, that the heart pumps blood around the body feels less like a genre marker than a careless error. It’s more a matter of her not belonging in any consistent way to any particular people or century.

In certain guises Mary rings true: Mary the grief-stricken mother, for example, and Mary the debunker of self-serving myth-making; even Mary the ‘thin wild cat’ is not totally unimaginable. However, the sum of the parts does not come across as the incarnation of anyone at all from any time or place, she is nobody you can plausibly conjure up. Who is this first-century Jewish village woman who has stopped going to the synagogue to become a devotee of the fierce virgin goddess Artemis, even saving her money to buy a silver graven image of her and speaking at the end of her monologue about ‘the gods of this place’? How can this consummate stylist possibly be an uneducated village woman from Roman Palestine? Who is this Mary who loved her son and wondered at his ‘power’ while showing not the slightest interest in his teachings or his mission to ‘redeem the world’? It is a mission she declares ‘not worth it’, all the same. ‘I am not one of his followers,’ she says.

Tóibín’s Jesus is completely recognisable as a prophet with ideas above his station (India is full of them to this day). His Mary, however, more often than not sounds like a well-read Irishwoman who is fed up with the mumbo jumbo of Catholicism and would like to say her piece. She ends up being no one.

Caravaggio turned his Death of the Virgin into a meditation on death. At times, Tóibín seems on the verge of achieving the same small miracle. But for the miracle to take place, the meditating voice must come from someone we can, if only for a few moments or hours, seize hold of and believe in as the embodiment of something. It never quite does.