Jesus and Jimi Hendrix

It was Easter 2004 when I had the idea for a story about the return to earth of a benevolent, stoner Christ. I had published nothing at that point and was still two years away from writing Kill Your Friends, the novel that would finally give me a career at the age of forty. What I had written, back in 2004, was two unproduced screenplays. My lack of enthusiam for writing a novel was to do with humility: sit down to write a novel and part of you, I felt, was saying: Joyce, Nabokov, James - here I come. You are treading in some mighty footsteps.

 

But the screenplay was what I was familiar with then, so I charged into the idea as a film script and, writing in longhand in pencil on a yellow legal pad - something I’d never done before or since - I wrote the first seventy pages very quickly. These pages are pretty much what would become the first section of the novel: the scenes in Heaven and Hell leading up to the decision to send Jesus back to earth, with the dialogue and structure pretty much intact.

 

Another interesting thing about the process here is that when I write fiction, I find I don’t have a concrete of idea what the characters look like until quite late in the process. With screenplays it helps a lot if I imagine the actor I’m writing for. In the case of The Second Coming it was either a young Jack Lemmon or an old George Clooney for God, Owen Wilson for Jesus - this was 2004 remember, so it was the Hansel Wilson of Zoolander I was probably thinking about - and it seemed to me Danny Devito would be perfect as Satan.

 

The idea for making Jesus - and God, and, indeed, everyone in heaven - a stoner was partly inspired by Bill Hicks’ musings on cannabis: how we make something that grows naturally upon the planet illegal. Like saying God made a mistake. Hicks imagines God looking down upon the earth on the seventh day; ‘There it is. The earth. Perfect and holy in every detail. Wait a minute...shit! I left pot growing everywhere! People are going to think they should smoke it. Now I have to create Republicans...’

 

And then I just stopped dead around page 70, a little over halfway through the story as I conceived of it then. One reason for this was cold feet: if felt like a big expensive movie and, given the politics of a stoner Jesus, I seriously doubted any major Hollywood studio would ever go for the idea. The other reason was creative: I just didn’t know where to take the story after Jesus came back to earth. 

 

‘These thousands of wasted hours writers must learn to take like Spartans,’ as the old saying goes. The manuscript went into a drawer and I moved onto the next thing, Music from Big Pink, which eventually became my debut novella at the end of 2005. Then Kill Your Friends, (2008), then The Amateurs, (2009), with a couple of movie scripts in-between. 

 

During those years the Jesus idea didn’t completely go away and, meanwhile, the whole Pop Idol/X Factor thing was becoming a phenomenon. I’d already written a scene in Heaven where Jesus was learning guitar from Hendrix so...why not make him a musician and have his adventures on that kind of show become the second part of the story?

 

I began again – as a novel this time - in the summer of 2009 and it was published at Easter 2011, making it by far the longest gestation period a book of mine has ever had. 

 

Around publication I went on Radio Four’s Front Row with Mark Lawson and was asked if I thought there was going to be a huge row. Other interviews asked similar things: With scenes like Jesus narrowly avoiding being sodomized in prison, had I gone too far? Wasn’t it overly confrontational publishing such a book at Easter? Did I expect protests, calls for a ban and the like? I genuinely didn’t. I felt we were beyond all that, over here in civilized, atheistic Britain. I wasn’t so sure about America. I’m still not: the book was rejected by my publisher over there.

 

And so it proved. There’s been the odd letter and online complaint of course - ‘John Niven has mocked the God I love and when Jesus does return HE WILL PAY!’ - but in the main it’s been a pretty easy ride. Even more so in Europe, where the novel was a bestseller in Germany and, more recently, got off to a flying start in good old Catholic Italy. Ironically, given the gestation of the project, there have now been a couple of offers for the film rights. 

 

What I took from the experience was this: 1) Never junk an idea. Those ‘thousands of wasted hours’ are rarely completely wasted. It might take a while, maybe years, but if its got legs the other pieces will fall into place eventually. 2) If something isn’t working in one format try and write a chunk of it in another, i.e. novel to screenplay, or stage play, or whatever. And 3), like Ferris Bueller says, you can never go too far.

 

Happy Easter.