Review of The Book of Job: Authorised King James Version, with an Introduction by Louis de Bernières

Bibliographical details:
The Book of Job: Authorised King James Version, with an Introduction by Louis de Bernières. 1998. Edinburgh: Canongate.

Publisher’s information:
The Authorised King James Version of the Bible, translated between 1603–11, coincided with an extraordinary flowering of English literature. This version, more than any other, and possibly more than any other work in history, has had an influence in shaping the language we speak and write today. Presenting individual books from the Bible as separate volumes, as they were originally conceived, encourages the reader to approach them as literary works in their own right.

The first twelve books in this series encompass categories as diverse as history, fiction, philosophy, love poetry and law. Each Pocket Canon also has its own introduction, specially commissioned from an impressive range of writers, which provides a personal interpretation of the text and explores its contemporary relevance.

Louis de Bernières’s first three novels are The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts, Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord and The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman. His last book, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, is now a major best-seller worldwide and it won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, Best Book, in 1995. Louis de Bernières lives in London.

	Review
	This small volume features the book of Job in the translation of the King James Version together with a short introduction to Job by Louis de Bernières, entitled ‘The Impatience of Job’.
	In this introduction, de Bernières shows himself to be reasonably well-informed of scholarly conclusions regarding the book of Job. Thus he is aware, for instance, of ancient Near Eastern parallels, the apocryphal ‘Testament of Job’ and the Islamic tale about Job and his wife. He talks briefly about the development of the book, noting that there may have been at least three authors, and he praises the beauty and power of the poetry.
	There are some interesting comments on the translation of the King James Version, which he describes as ‘often confused and inaccurate’ (p. viii) due to the fact that the translators did not have access to the findings of modern biblical scholarship. As an example of ‘a hopeless mistranslation of the original verses’ de Bernières mentions the well-known words ‘I know that my redeemer liveth’, which, he says, ‘are not about redemption and resurrection at all’ (p. ix).
	Considering the book’s key issue to be that of theodicy, de Bernières then moves on to provide a rough summary of the plot of Job. This is at times witty and amusing, as in the following example: The quantity of shekels involved in this bet [of Satan and God] is not recorded, but no doubt Satan spends them whilst going once more to and fro in the earth … (p. x) Job’s comforters are described as ‘the most irritating characters in all of literature’, while Elihu is said to say ‘nothing interesting or original, in the manner of sententious bores the world over’ (ibid.).
	In line with the title of his introduction, de Bernières notes that the well-known phrase about the ‘”patience of Job” could not be further from the mark’ (p. xi) and that the ‘defiance of Job’ would have been a much more appropriate term to describe the attitude of the book’s hero. Observing Job’s total refusal to disengage his intelligence or give up his case, de Bernières considers him to be a very modern figure …, one who asserts his individuality and integrity in the face of all conventional wisdom or arbitrary power. He is, in other words, a classic existentialist hero (p. xiii). As regards God’s role in the drama, de Bernières believes him to come out of the story ‘as the most morally tarnished’. Instead of answering Job’s charges of injustice and heartlessness, God devotes 129 verses to a magnificently irrelevant and bombastic speech about His own accomplishments and abilities; it is as if He knows perfectly well that He has abused His power, but does not wish to address the issue (ibid.). This leads de Bernières to refer briefly to other biblical passages that present God in a rather bad light, only to conclude that either God must be ‘a mad, bloodthirsty, and capricious despot’ (p. xiv) or we have been worshipping the devil instead. He ends by highlighting the inadequacy of this God, noting that ‘Job is still winning the argument, and The Book of Job is still insidiously subversive’ (ibid.).
	Readers familiar with the book of Job will of course have noticed that the Job of the biblical story does not consider himself to have won the argument with God, far from it. And although it is indeed subversive in a variety of ways, the book’s point is precisely that Job does not walk away from God. De Bernières’ conclusions are thus not a little ironic, given the thrust of the story itself.
	Unfortunately, de Bernières does not engage with readings of Job that differ from his own (for instance, not everyone would regard the divine speeches as quite as irrelevant as he suggests) and might have helped to temper his rather dogmatic concluding pronouncements.

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