The Final Testament is a diligent attempt at blasphemy

Nicely timed for Easter, we have The Final Testament of the Holy Bible, or James Frey's take on the Second Coming. It is, the author said in one interview, "the most audacious thing I could think of doing". The publisher's blurb exhorts us: "Be moved, be enraged, be enthralled, by this extraordinary masterpiece." Which, I take it, is an invitation to get worked up about the blasphemous character of the whole exercise.

They wish. What is striking about James Frey's Messiah is that he comes close to being subsumed in the more fascinating persona of James Frey.

The picture on the jacket shows a bearded man in profile, head bent, in weirdly soft focus, bare-skinned. The blurb on the back of the book says breathlessly: "He's been called a liar. A cheat. A con man. He's been called a saviour. A revolutionary. A genius."

Oh right, you think, a Man of Sorrows then, this Messiah. Bit of a revolutionary, like Christ.

Except then it turns out that the saviour in question is in fact, the author ("sued by readers, dropped by publishers") though he neglects to point out that these things happened mostly in the context of his book on his crack addiction, and his shameless fibbing about being manhandled by cops and thrown into prison.

Anyway, the new Messiah (New York version) is a bit of an oddball. He starts as a dropout, then, after surviving being sliced in pieces by falling plate glass, he emerges from hospital with a curious in-depth knowledge of Hebrew scripture as well as string theory and quantum mechanics and conversation-level Aramaic. It turns out that his name is Ben Zion, and he is Jewish, though his family rashly forsook their Judaism for evangelical Christianity. Ben's resemblances to the Messiah are as follows: he was born of the line of David on the anniversary of the destruction of the Temple, already circumcised; he can see into people's hearts, just like that.

Oh, and he was apparently conceived without a human father.

He returns to his evangelical family, infuriates his brother by making out with a male member of his church at dinner, turns water into wine, then makes for the tunnels underneath New York to join a scary armed commune who believe the world above ground is coming to an end.

In a series of subterranean epileptic fits, he communes with the divine and develops his Messianic persona. This involves being able to heal emotionally wounded people by his gaze, his embrace and when necessary by extended sexual intercourse.

The important things, he says at one point, are love and fucking, and he often combines the two, especially in the case of Mariangeles, a comely teenage Latina with low self-esteem. After a happy spell in his own commune, a farm provided by a fat, white devotee, where free love and non-judgmentalism are all that is needed for harmony among his diverse 77 disciples, he returns to New York and undergoes a Passion of his own.

Naturally, the new Messiah has a gospel. But the message of Ben Zion seems curiously reminiscent of what a tiresome, self-regarding liberal white agnostic American would come up with if prompted for his views on organised religion.

"The Bible was written two thousand years ago," he tells his appalled family. "The world is a different place now." Or as Mariangeles observed, "He never tired of fucking. Said coming was the closest thing any human on earth would ever know about Heaven No one should tell other people how to fuck That men in silly robes ... who ain't never fucked in their life certainly got no right."

Indeed, as proof of his transformative powers, a Catholic priest leaves the ministry after a single encounter. Ben is contemptuous of the Holy Bible, and God, but prudently enough, never quite gets round to being rude about the Koran; he's not stupid.

What's interesting is just how difficult it is to get worked up about this diligent attempt at blasphemy. It's just such a wretched parody of the real thing: a boy piddling against a cathedral. What did get me angry was the way the author does away with quotation marks; that is controversial.

James Frey and former vicar Mark Vernon will be discussing blasphemy at the ICA, The Mall, SW1 today at 6.45pm (020 7930 3647; ica.org.uk).