My friend Jesus Christ

The good thing about trying to bash in Jesus Christ's head is that he's immortal. Plus, he forgives you afterwards. Though there might be strings attached.

But let's start from the beginning: Nikolaj is a Bad Person. The son of a widely loved pop star and an orphan from a very young age, he's been raised by his teenage sister with far too much money to spend and turns into a Freudian nightmare. He gets in bad company, and looking for some sort of place in life he turns to violence, destruction, manipulation. His best friend is a skinhead called Satan. He abuses his girlfriend. He sets out to ruin his sister's marriage to make sure she only cares about him.

And when he finally hits bottom, sunk as low as a rich human being in a rich Western country can sink, driven away and ruined the lives of everyone who's ever made the mistake of trying to be kind to him, he wakes up in the middle of the night and finds a bearded guy in sandals in his kitchen. He tries to brain the intruder with an ashtray and nothing happens. And Jesus tells Nikolaj that this is it: it's time not only to sin no more, but to atone. Leave Copenhagen, move back to the backwater small town your mother fled to become a star, and try to be a Good Person.

My Friend Jesus Christ, the debut novel of a Danish writer translated into English a few years ago, starts to confuse me right around that point, and even after finishing it I'm not sure what to make of it. If it was really black comedy before then it switches into overdrive around the halfway point, as Nikolaj and his newfound friends (apparently, nothing makes you more popular than admitting that you're a bad person) start to set right everything he's messed up in his life to get Jesus to leave them alone. He has to fix everything he's done to the people he hurt (the ones who are still alive), whether they want him to or not. It's not a religious book, even if you assume that that's really Jesus in it and not just a hallucination by a very disturbed young man. Husum has worked with Lars von Trier, and any fans of his will recognize the themes - violence, evil, self-sacrificing women, and a sense of dark humour that just keeps coming. See: Jesus Christ literally tackle Satan! See: our hero get into it with Jehovah's witnesses! See: Danish small town dwellers freak out over the amount of black people in Copenhagen! Etc.

But at the same time there's a crawling sense of unease: as good as the idea of atoning for your sins and making up for it sounds, are we really supposed to sympathize with Nikolaj when he stops controlling and manipulating people to hurt them and instead starts controlling and manipulating them to [-]feel better about himself[/-] help them? It's striking how much changes, both in Nikolaj himself and how everyone else sees him, when he openly admits what a horrible person he's been and decides to change his wicked ways, but also how little changes: Nikolaj turns from Bad to Good, but it's still entirely about him and he's still the one in charge. Or is he...?

My Friend Jesus Christ, while hardly a literary masterpiece raises both laughs and some pretty interesting questions of why this type of story fascinates us, and whether it should - if we, by celebrating those who try to atone for the wrong they do, actually turn wrongdoers into ideals. I'm just not sure how much of that is deliberate by the writer. If Husum just wanted to write a story about how easy it is to turn your life around and how everyone is required to forgive those who ruin their lives, I suppose he will just have to do the Christian thing and forgive me for seeing more in it than he intended.