HOWEVER tawdry the contemporary Christmas may have become, the original Bethlehem story continues to captivate all but the most jaded and cynical. Expressed briefly, its appeal lies in its blend of magic and mystery, those characteristics which it shares with all powerful narratives. The human imaginations of succeeding generations reinterpret and reconstruct, but something elusive remains: it is a story which, perhaps more than any other, gives birth to other stories.
As Jostein Gaarder has clearly shown in Sophie's World and in The Solitaire Mystery, his primary interest is in the kind of multi layered narrative where stories interweave, where truth and fiction teasingly interlock and where a great deal of erudition can painlessly be assimilated. While these remain his principal concerns in his new book, The Christmas Mystery (trans. Elizabeth Rokkan; Phoenix House, £14.99 in UK), there is a linguistic simplicity and straightforwardness here which makes the book accessible to readers of nine and upwards: the exceedingly attractive colour illustrations by Rosemary Wells will act as a wonderful extra incentive.
It is the last day of November and in a Norwegian bookshop Papa and his son Joachim are buying an Advent calendar. They reject the flashy modern models in favour of a faded older version, apparently donated to the bookseller by someone mysteriously known as "old John": the mystery is compounded by the fact that the calendar bears an inscription proclaiming its magical qualities. Next morning, Joachim, in opening the first of the calendar's 24 windows, is to have his first exciting taste of what this enticing information means.
THE excitement lasts, in fact, until Christmas Eve, by which time the pieces of paper which fall daily from the calendar's windows have accumulated to provide the story of a little girl called Elisabet and of her amazing journey, backwards over the years, from Norway to Bethlehem. The reader shares the increasing curiosity and wonder of Joachim and his family as they follow Elisabet's pilgrimage, on which, gradually and engagingly as it proceeds, she is joined by a flock of sheep, angels, wise men and other assorted biblical characters.
But in more than one sense, this is only the story. We watch, with an awe matching Joachim's, as Elisabet moves from fantasy to fact, a transformation which beautifully parallels the one which, two millennia earlier, had graced a Bethlehem stable. Truly, as Joachim's mother reminds us at one point in this totally delightful novel, history is full of strange connections.