Prince of Chaos meets Prince of Peace

Anne Rice's new novel Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt is written in the first person, with a seven-year-old Jesus as the protagonist. Holiness meets creature comforts in this well-researched 'incantation'. This is a must for new and old Anne Rice fans

The family in Anne Rice's new novel has a secret. A really, really big one. These people have had a life-altering experience that they hide from their seven year old. When the boy raises questions – "But who were the men from the East, Mamma?" or "But what happened in Bethlehem?" – his relatives are mum.

But the boy begins to sense the truth. He notices he has unusual abilities. He can make it snow or raise the dead. He can sense the presence of angels. He also has dreams of terrible, fiery destruction and is visited by a figure who calls himself the Prince of Chaos. By the end of Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, this young boy knows that he himself is the Prince of Peace.

Christ the Lord is written in the first person. How dare Rice appropriate the voice of young Jesus? She is best known for maudlin, histrionic vampire tales, so the innocence of a 7-year-old would not seem to come naturally. But Rice makes the transition much more easily than might be expected. And she delivers the only shock effects still available to her, after a career-length cavalcade of kinks: piety and moderation.

Christ the Lord shares predilections with her other books. Even in biblical times and in the Holy Land, Rice retains her obsessions with ritual and purification, with lavish detail and gaudy décor. But she writes this book in a simpler, leaner style, giving it the slow but inexorable rhythm of an incantation. The restraint and prayerful beauty of Christ the Lord is apt to surprise her usual readers and attract new ones.

The book is steeped in Jewish tradition, which could also surprise some. Its young narrator – at one point called Jesus bar Joseph bar Jacob bar Matthan bar Eleazar bar Eliud of the Tribe of David – is part of a large and joyful family, all devoted to observing the traditions of Jewish holidays as well as the tribulations of Jewish life. The boy finds immense happiness in being taken from Alexandria back to Jerusalem and brought to see the monumental synagogue there. But why did the family spend years in Egypt? This too is part of the forbidden past.

The immediate family includes a father figure (though the boy senses that Joseph is not his real father), mother (Mary, whose way is "to say small things, and nothing more") and older stepbrother, James, who suffers the world's worst case of sibling rivalry. Ms. Rice fills in the spaces around them with many uncles (Cleopas, Alphaeus and Simon), aunts (Salome, Esther and Mary), cousins and elders who reflect the prodigious extent of her research. Around them, the Roman Empire is in turmoil after the death of King Herod and the power struggles in his wake.

Rice would like the reader to know how zealously she has studied this era. So she incorporates many relatively little-known biblical figures into the story; among them are Rabbi Berekhaiah bar Phineas, Rabbi Sherebiah and Athronges, a messianic claimant often cited for his lack of distinction. The book also emphasises the four languages that figure in its characters' lives – Aramaic, Hebrew, Greek and Latin – as well as the harvesting of olives and the eating of pottage. Here is a way to be reminded that the Roman denarius was the main coin of the realm.

The book's steady attention to such details slows its progress. It stops frequently for scenery, not all of it the kind that a young boy might notice. "It seemed that the women of this place used a loom with one pole to it," he says of Sepphoris, a town near Nazareth, "and one crosspiece at which they had to stand. But we had brought back from Alexandria bigger looms, with two sliding crosspieces, at which the woman could sit, and the women of the village all came to see this." This gives the book a hint of museum diorama.

But even as it notices the tassels on the vestments of a High Priest, the book is moving its main character toward enlightenment. "An angel had come, an angel to my mother, and no man had been my father, but what did such a thing mean?" he wonders.

He elicits further revelations from Uncle Cleopas, whose rhetorical style here resembles Donald Rumsfeld's: "Must you grow up before you fulfill the prophesies? Yes, you must. And must you be a child first before you are a man? Yes. How else?" This is as close as Christ the Lord comes to justifying its hands-on approach to Jesus' boyhood.

On the spectrum of popular Christian literature, Rice's book occupies an unusual position. It avoids the lurid, violent underpinnings of novels like Tim LaHaye and Jerry B Jenkins's Left Behind books. It is more direct and secular than books meant for most religious readers. If its research is more studious than spellbinding, it also avoids the kinds of flaps prompted by The Da Vinci Code. It may prompt nit-picking, but it isn't likely to polarise.

Eventually, Christ the Lord is ready for its main revelation: what happened in Bethlehem. There is no end to the ways in which a writer could present this. Anne Rice's is to incorporate the bloody revenge wrought on other infants by King Herod while also treating this as a real family's experience. David Maine's recent Fallen, about Adam, Eve, Cain and Abel, offers a much more interesting literary version of this tactic.

In the voice of Jesus' mother, Rice writes: "It was full of people that night, Bethlehem, and we couldn't find a place to stay." And: "You were born there in the stable. And I wrapped you up and put you in the manger."

While the family laughs "the usual gentle family laugh," she mixes holiness with, quite literally, creature comforts. "And the beasts kept us very warm," she says, "while the tenants froze in the rooms above."

©The New York Times