The Master and Garish Squeal

I received a piece of spam from a sender purporting to be named Garish Squeal -- a name at once Dickensenian and pornographic.

With that provenance, I had to open it; besides, it missed being caught in the junk mailbox. The spam was about a supposed hot stock. But the interesting part is that the stock tip was enclosed in text copied from the Russian masterpiece The Master and Margarita -- a one-of-a-kind novel about the purity of art and love vs. the machinations of the devil and the Soviet system, complete with a fragmented narration of the Passion.

It's coincidental that I received this piece of spam today, because I thought about that book and its portrayal of the Passion this morning during the Palm Sunday service. In the Christian Palm Sunday (or "Passion Sunday") service, the whole passion narrative is read, from the entry into Jerusalem to the institution of the Lord's Supper and on to Christ's suffering in Gethsemane, his arrest by a mob, his trial before the Jewish and Roman authorities, his betrayal by Peter, and his crucifixion and burial.

As I said, this story is recounted in a feverish, fractured way in Bulgakov's novel, from the point of view of the disciple Matthew and of Pontius Pilate; a more memorable fictionalization of the story can hardly be imagined. Yet that's not even the main thrust of the novel, it's only a story within the story; it's the text of the novel that the character "the Master" has written. Among many other amazing aspects of the novel are sustained portrayals of the Devil and his minions as a sort of crew of weird piratical magicians, including a man-sized cat named Behemoth. There might even have been -- though there isn't -- a character named Garish Squeal.

You could call the novel magic realism, but it's hardly realism at all, it's more surrealism. And yet the strange events of the story, and there are many, take place in a realistically portrayed Moscow of the 1930s. If you have never read this amazing novel, you must.