A towering biblical story about John the Apostle
These are not the Bible stories we were told in Sunday school
In the Gospel of John in the Bible, there are six references to the disciple Christ “loved,” singling out the follower who was present at several key points in Christ’s last days, including the Last Supper (it is the beloved disciple who is leaning against Christ, and who asks Jesus to identify who will betray him), and the crucifixion (it is he who Christ is referring to when he says to Mary, “This is your son”).
Although he is never referred to by name in the Bible, and while some Biblical scholars disagree, this disciple is generally thought to be John (brother of James, aka John the Apostle, John the Evangelist, and St. John the Beloved), who went on to become the only disciple to die of natural causes and old age.
That beloved disciple is the central figure in “Dayspring,” the stunning and revelatory debut novel from Toronto writer Anthony Oliveira, who builds from the scattered Biblical references a towering work.
These are not, however, the Bible stories we were told in Sunday school.
In “Dayspring,” we first meet Christ (“coarse hair/crooked smile/the taste of salt on his clavicle”) in the arms of the unnamed disciple, languishing in postconnubial torpor. When the beloved asks him for a story, Christ tells him the story of his birth:
“… ok. ok. so. the night i was born there … there were a lot of animals. It doesn’t matter why ok. ok. So there were doves in rafters high, and sheep with curly horn, and uh, a cow all white and red and a donkey shaggy and brown around a baby? were you born in a very funny”
(The book’s adoption of the Bible convention of printing the words of Christ in red (here shown in italics) is an inspired choice in passages like this.)
As the story continues, details begin to break down, including the fact that, while his birthday is in midspring, it was cold in the barn “because it was Christmas.”
In less than one page of snuggling and storytelling, Oliveira handily sets the terms for the book that will follow: “Dayspring” is a book about love, rooted in both the body and the spirit, which, while drawn from the Bible, incorporates thousands of years of history and personal experience.
A mix of poetry and prose, “Dayspring” effortlessly moves from Galilee to the Gay Village, from the experience of a young fisherman to the relationship between David (the musician who slew Goliath, later king) and Jonathan, son of King Saul, to that of a boy hiding his relationship from his parents. It serves as something of a commonplace book, including works by the likes of Meister Eckhart, St. Teresa of Avila, and other Christian mystics, alongside numerous, frequently veiled pop culture references, such as:
“and i turned, and ran up the strand and the footprints on the beach were all my f**king own.”
It’s a powerful piece of storytelling, emotionally fraught and frequently hilarious.
It feels like the work of a writer’s life, and it might just be. In a letter which accompanied pre-release copies of the book, Oliveira — who writes for Marvel Comics, has a scholarly PhD, and who has won the National Magazine Award three times, including for the short story version of “Dayspring” in 2019 — reveals that he began writing the book when he was 17. The final version of the book includes some of those fragments, although the bulk of “Dayspring” was written during the pandemic “in a sudden, solitary frenzy.”
Formally, the blending of poetry and prose, along with the collagelike incorporation of other materials, is reminiscent of the work of Anne Carson, while tonally “Dayspring” will remind readers of the work of Leonard Cohen (“f**k your secret chord,” the narrator says at one point), an ongoing reckoning of faith against questions, of love against dogma. “Dayspring” dances in the dynamic equilibrium of the sacred and the profane, the transcendent and the quotidian, the divine and the perverse, until there remain no distinctions: every word is a prayer, every action a liturgy.