Point Quote Comment

In an age when large swathes of the publishing world seem obsessed with genre and want from their ‘bestselling authors’ the same story with the same cover art over and over again, it’s genuinely refreshing and inspiring to follow a writer like Benjamin Myers and not know what he’s going to do next. Readers of his will understand; non-readers of his should check out his oeuvre. Like all writers worth discussing, he definitely won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but I would suspect that’s the way he would want it. One senses in his shifts in genre and tone between books a spiky or stubborn Yorkshire distaste for pleasing people, even his readers. In an Instagram post towards the end of 2025, he joked that one reason for buying Jesus Christ Kinski might be as a Christmas gift for your least favourite relative. My hardback copy, replete with Kinski’s screen-captured demonic sneer, was a Christmas gift from my wife (requested back in October, I hasten to add).

The premise is deceptively simple. As the tagline says, it’s “A Novel about a Film about a Performance about Jesus.” And to some degree, this is true. The book’s most prominent structural aspect is Klaus Kinski’s ill-fated performance of Jesus Christ Erlöser at the Deutschlandhalle, West Berlin, 22 November 1971 (available on YouTube as an oddly compelling visual accompaniment to the novel). Through his use of the tricky second person, Myers places us immediately into Kinski’s monstrous ego, hell-bent on self-destruction, or at least (it seems) self-sabotage, about to perform in a toxic home crowd atmosphere where, “Sensing blood, the critics are already circling.”

One Financial Times reviewer of Myers’ book has called the narration “accusatory” but if that is the case, then it is self-accusatory, surely, the voice of a deeply troubled mind staring into the void of the green room mirror or the darkness of the auditorium beyond the footlights, where hecklers do so from the shadowed safety-in-numbers of a comfy seat in the dress circle.

And then there is the other voice of the book, the (auto)-biographical third person (if that makes sense), in which Myers is “the writer” struggling with his own possibly “self-sabotaging” notion of following an unexpected bestseller in translation (The Offing in Germany (2020)) and critical acclaim for Cuddy (2023) with a novel about a “totalitarian egotist,” an abusive lothario actor performing and inevitably failing as the Son of God. One can only imagine Myers’ agent’s first reaction on hearing the elevator pitch. And if that wasn’t enough to rub a few readers and reviewers up the wrong way and fly in the face of the genre police, there is the triangulation of Kinski’s performance with Iggy Pop’s and Adolf Hitler’s, no less (a quadrangulation if we include Myers’ ‘performance’ as “the writer”):

. . . the idea of a rock star who was a cross between Iggy Pop and Adolf Hitler was appealing to the writer, if only because in the third decade of the twenty-first century the entire idea of ‘rock stars’ was absurd, outdated and generally frowned upon.

As a former music journalist who’d written on the likes of The Clash and John Lydon, and as a Yorkshire writer of Northern Noir who’d eschewed his success in that arena for an experimental deep dive into the history of counterfeiting in the Dales in the brilliant Gallows Pole (2017), one senses something of the literary contrarian in Myers, a writer on the lookout for what’s least expected of him next. And while the success of The Offing in Germany may well have been in the back of Bloomsbury’s collective mind if they questioned at all the prudence of publishing the genre misfit that is Jesus Christ Kinski, thank Christ they were brave enough to buck the trend that plagues much of the mainstream publishing world today, that sometimes seems to want its writers and their works entirely “relatable” with “No danger” and “Nothing too extreme.”