'I, Agabus the Decapolitan began this work at Alexandria in the ninth year of the Emperor Domitian and completed it at Rome in the thirteenth year of the same.' With consummate ease Robert Graves lures us into the ancient past, a past in which at Alexandria culture has been gathered into one of the greatest and most vulnerable libraries ever created, and at Rome power like none before has been concentrated in one people and one man. It is into this world that King Jesus the wonder-worker is born. In siting his account at the dawn of the Christian era, Graves sloughs off the nagging, destructive controversies of later centuries and churches to get close to the smells, textures and sounds of a world out of which Jesus steps with powerful immediacy. Jesus is deeply familiar and yet strange in this book, the lost heir-at-law of Herod's throne, a man who loves his people and their spiritual culture and whose death is a complex tragedy that affects us in every sense. King Jesus and My Head! My Head! (which evokes Elisha) though fiction, are different in kind from Graves's more famous Claudius novels; they are also more inventive and experimental. Here religion, history and poetry nurture one another into what the editor Robert Davis calls 'mythological fiction', writing that 'restores to the historical imagination of the writer and the reader the integrative patterns and symbolic resources of a genuinely mythopoeic sensibility'.
Robert Graves (1895-1985), poet, classical scholar, novelist, and critic, was one of the greatest writers of the 20th Century. Athough he produced over 100 books he is perhaps best known for the novel I, CLAUDIUS (1934),THE WHITE GODDESS (1948) and GREEK MYTHS (1955). Born in Wimbledon, south London, Graves was educated at Charterhouse, and awarded a B.Litt by St. John's College, Oxford after his return from World war I. He died in 1985 in Deja, the Majorcan village he had made his home (with the exception of the Spanish civil war and the Second World War) since 1929. Robert A. Davis is Head of Department of Religious Education in the University of Glasgow. He has taught and written widely on literature, myth and religion, including studies of Richard Wagner, Walter Benjamin and the figure of the Trickster. He has been Visiting Lecturer at a number of institutions, including universities in Copenhagen, Helsinki and Dublin. He was Vice President of the Robert Graves Society.
King Jesus My Head! My Head!
'No one else offers his precise combination of eroticism, nightmare and epigram.' - Sean O'Brien, The Guardian. 'While poetry schools came and went, Graves went on writing until his death in 1985, in an elegant, classically inspired style.' - Andrew Crumey, Scotland on Sunday.
