Jesus Christ Kinski (2025)
Why this one?
It’s the new one by Benjamin Myers! Author of Cuddy and The Offing and many other books that I really need to read! Plus, the subject matter, the cover, the title… everything about this screamed MUST READ NOW to me.
Benjamin Myers (1976- ; active 2004-) was born in Durham, England. In his teens, he was a member of the local punk band Sour Face, and began writing for the weekly music paper Melody Maker. Alongside his journalism, he also published books on the likes of John Lydon, Green Day and The Clash. He published his first novel, The Book of Fuck, in 2004, but it was his second Richard: A Novel (2010), about missing Manic Street Preachers member Richey Edwards, that brought wider attention.
His third novel, 2012's Pig Iron, won the inaugural Gordon Burn Prize, and his fifth, The Gallows Pole (2017) won the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. The latter was adapted for the BBC by Shane Meadows (This is England) and aired in 2023. His beautiful 2019 novel The Offing is being adapted as a film by director Jessica Hobbs (Broadchurch, The Crown) starring Helena Bonham Carter. 2023’s Cuddy won the Goldsmith’s Prize and is generally incredible. He followed that book with the much lighter in tone but equally enjoyable Rare Singles (2024). Alongside his literary novels he has also published crime fiction, short stories and poetry. He is married to fellow author Adelle Stripe.
Thoughts, etc.
Jesus Christ Kinski’s premise initially seems to be the recreation of a single performance by the prolific and legendarily volatile actor Klaus Kinski. After many years acting in movies (of wildly varying quality) in 1971 Kinski returned to the theatrical stage for a one-man show at Berlin’s Deutschlandhalle, a monologue entitled Jesus Christus Erlöser ("Jesus Christ the Saviour / Redeemer”). His intense performance rapidly devolved into a kind of battle between Kinski and the audience. The occasion was captured on film and released as a documentary in 2008. In the book’s first part, we are thrown directly into the performance, told in Kinski’s own voice, and moving wildly between reportage of the event itself and Myers’ invention (using words from Kinski’s autobiographies) of what may have been going through his mind.
After a little while, we are given some respite from the mind of Kinski as we switch to a rather different scenario: the countryside of Northern England in the Covid lockdown years. Here we find ‘the author’ living in seeming solitude, enjoying life after the success of a recent novel that had done unexpectedly well in Germany, and postponing work on his next opus (a life of the English Saint Cuthbert) by repeatedly watching YouTube footage from Kinski’s Jesus Christus Erlöser and on and off researching Kinski for another potential book. From this point, we alternate between the two scenarios, back into the thrilling reanimation of Kinski, and back out again to a setting in which our ‘author’ muses on the ethics of writing from the perspective of such a wildly vilified character (especially given his newfound semi-celebrity in Germany, a country in which opinions on Kinski are probably most extreme).
It’s definitely a book of two halves. The Kinski sections are a tour de force, a brilliant rendering of the intensity, near-insanity and creative obsession of an evident genius and equally evident bastard. While it focuses squarely on that one notorious performance, it also gives us brief flashes of other key moments in Kinski’s wild life, from his wartime internment as a POW, through his voracious womanising, his mercenary approach to accepting film roles, and (most entertainingly) his vitriol aimed at long-time collaborator Werner Herzog. Where it suits, Myers allows Kinski to jump forward in time (because why not) and therefore despite the fact that it only represents half of a very slim book, we get an amazingly rich portrait of Kinski - of course very deliberately told from the narcissist’s own perspective and in his own words, so in no way claiming to be an objective portrait.
The other half of the book is helpful at a structural level because it provides a kind of light relief from the intensity of the Kinski sections. It’s also interesting in that it seems on the surface at least to offer a direct insight into the mind of Myers himself, who is usually busy inhabiting the voices of the long-dead or otherwise generally eschewing autobiography in his works. ‘The writer’ lives where Myers lives, is clearly basking in the German success of The Offing and early negotiations around its film adaptation, and killing time in between early drafts of Cuddy. And, of course, contemplating a book on Kinski. Yet there are subtle differences that suggest that we’re not meant to treat these sections as straightforward ‘truth’ and more as a kind of autofiction, or perhaps just another layer in the examination of creative obsession, artistic provocation and the thin line between genius and insanity that the book is clearly interested in.
The modern day sections took me a little longer to appreciate. I enjoyed reading them (albeit not nearly as much as the Kinski parts) and understood their purpose in adding a layer of distance to the depiction of a deeply problematic figure. But in some senses I initially wondered if they might have been in some ways a bit of a cop-out. These sections allow Myers to ponder out loud about the ethics of dealing with controversial figures, especially in the specific climate of social media, ‘cancel culture’ and public scrutiny, via the slightly shifted perspective of his stand-in ‘writer’, and not take the more potentially difficult decision of just putting the Kinski work out there to stand alone. Having said that, there’s a counter argument which is that it allows the Kinski sections to be even more extreme and unfiltered, in that the nuance and moderation can occur in the alternating sections.
Myers is also, I think, inviting us to muse on the very fact that our modern day ‘writer’ must spend an inordinate amount of time prevaricating over the appropriateness of his art, both from a position of increased awareness and genuine concern for those who might have suffered at the hands of some of his subject’s more monstrous behaviour, and - less ideally - from a position of increased nervousness around the potential consequences of putting controversial art out there in a climate of ‘cancelling’ and even more sinister forms of censorship. This we can contrast with Kinski’s shoot from the hip and consequences be damned extremism: which may have been uncomplicatedly BAD in the context of its real-world consequences, but many would struggle to deny that, on its day, it could allow for a more expressive, exciting and boundary-pushing art.
There’s also fun to be had in these sections. Alongside these deeper themes, we also find the writer getting comically lost in the woods, staring enviously at bigger houses over the way, and reflecting humorously on the chance decisions that have made his previous novel such a success in Germany. The treatment of the writer’s Kinski obsession is also comic in places, and yields more than a few laugh out loud observations (as when musing on the lack of insight and originality in Kinski’s allegedly provocative reading of Christ as somewhat rebellious - ‘no Sherlock shit’ sticks in the memory for all the right reasons).
Score
9.5
The most fun I’ve had reading anything in some time. Probably a 10 for the Kinski sections, and a very very slight drop for the other bits. As ever with Myers, you don’t really know what you’re going to get with his next book, or even from one page to the next. Whatever it is, though, you can usually rely on it being brilliant.
Next up
Back to the Booker longlist with Flesh, I think.
