The Gospel of Orla by Eoghan Walls: Jesus out of his depth amid modernity and teenage grief

“I am sad to go but it is time now, there is no point in hanging around any longer,” says 14-year-old Orla McDevitt, at the beginning of The Gospel of Orla, the debut novel by poet Eoghan Walls. It’s a literal and direct opening – Orla is performing that oh-so-teenage of rebellions, running away – but in a book about grief, and (not to be too grandiose) the meaning of life, its connotations are surely twofold.

Orla’s mother has recently died. Rather than stay in Lancaster with her jobless father, and helpless baby sister, Orla plans to journey to Northern Ireland, where her mother is buried. An encounter with a man who calls himself Jesus, the Son of God spooks her at first, but soon she finds herself biking towards Liverpool port with this man who can raise animals from the dead, and who wishes to spread the word to a disinterested, pub-going public.

In some ways the Jesus figure acts as a magic realist element, akin to the egg in another recent debut, Isaac and the Egg (a man befriends an enormous, sentient egg while grieving his wife’s death). Jesus is a manifestation of Orla’s confusion around death; a problematic wish fulfiller – if he can raise animals from the dead, he can do the same for her mother, she hopes. His odd presence in the otherwise normal world provides comedy and surprise.

The book poses the question: how does a secular society confront death? When religion has expired, what takes its place?

But the religious factor is by no means incidental. This returned Christ is no match for modern society – he is beaten, laughed at, shunned. Moreover, his promise of eternal life is inadequate to young Orla, especially considering the caveats of this promise. “If Jesus brings her back will it be […] the hospital mum with painted on eyebrows? Or will it be the young mum in a bikini with no stretch marks?” she wants to know. “Will she have to be a Holy Joe when she comes back? Are her choices to travel with Jesus or burn on the grass?” (In the rules of this world, reincarnated beings burn to death if they don’t stay in proximity to Jesus.) But Jesus’s presence allows Orla to examine these ideas in the first place, and the book poses the question: how does a secular society confront death? When religion has expired, what takes its place?

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Theological questions notwithstanding, the book is by turns funny, surprising, moving. With a poet’s control and playfulness, it paints a convincing portrait of a teenager’s grief and resilience.