Yet Mark’s Mary, along with the rest of her family, attempts to collect Jesus, because they believe he has gone mad (Mark 3:21, 31, 35). Luke, in his birth narrative, paints a portrait of a humble and reflective woman. Toíbín fills in gaps that the Gospels leave in their portrait of Mary, the mother of Jesus. By these choices, he seeks to engage and influence the thinking, emotions, and values of his readers in order to persuade them that the canonical Gospels may be dealing in “alternative facts.” In this brief essay, I wish to look at how we can hear Toíbín’s voice in his textual choices. Booth believes that authors never assume a position of complete impartiality-whether they are aware of it or not-and that their values never fade from view (Booth 1961, 67-70 see also 77-83). Key to Booth’s thesis is the notion that authors’ voices are always present in their texts and heard in their textual choices no matter how much they try to remove them. In his view, every author makes use of rhetorical resources (narrator, characters, point of view, irony, repetition, and so on) in order to try “consciously or unconsciously, to impose his fictional world upon the reader” (Booth 1961, xiii, his emphasis). In his 1961 Rhetoric of Fiction, Wayne Booth argued that narrative fiction is not about pure self-expression or aesthetics but about communication and persuasion (Booth 1983 ). We should not be surprised, however, because this is the way of all narrative fiction. Yet The Testament of Mary does not as much carry its own truths (or Mary’s) as it carries author’s persuasive aims. And it ends with her account of “what happened,” which she finally tells because it matters to her “that the truth should be spoken at least once in the world” (p. The story begins with Mary’s declaration that she “will not say anything that is not true” (p. The title of the book suggests that Mary is passing on her final words and instructions to those who will take up and read. Indeed, Colm Toíbín’s novel, The Testament of Mary, is a story about truth-telling. “After all,” she wrote, “each telling carries its own truths.” Cocozza wondered if the multiple voices of the four Gospels had left gaps for novelists to fill and in which to build new worlds. In a 2013 article in the Guardian, Paula Cocozza remarked that, “Jesus is having a moment in literary fiction.” A sudden spate of novels on Jesus had hit the shelves- The Liars Gospel, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, Lazarus is Dead, and The Testament of Mary. The Persuasive Art of Colm Toíbín in The Testament of Mary Tóibín’s tour de force of imagination and language is a portrait so vivid and convincing that our image of Mary will be forever transformed.For context to this series, reference the first blog here. This woman whom we know from centuries of paintings and scripture as the docile, loving, silent, long-suffering, obedient, worshipful mother of Christ becomes a tragic heroine with the relentless eloquence of Electra or Medea or Antigone. Mary judges herself ruthlessly (she did not stay at the foot of the cross until her son died-she fled, to save herself), and her judgment of others is equally harsh. She does not agree that her son is the Son of God nor that his death was “worth it” nor that the “group of misfits he gathered around him, men who could not look a woman in the eye,” were holy disciples. She has no interest in collaborating with the authors of the Gospel, who are her keepers. In the ancient town of Ephesus, Mary lives alone, years after her son’s crucifixion. “Tóibín is at his lyrical best in this beautiful and daring work” ( The New York Times Book Review) that portrays Mary as a solitary older woman still seeking to understand the events that become the narrative of the New Testament and the foundation of Christianity-shortlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Prize. 2014 Audie Award Finalist for Audiobook of the Year, Literary Fiction, and Solo Narration-Female!