THE FIRE GOSPEL by Michel Faber is reviewed by Ian Sansom in the Guardian. Excerpt:

This startling, short book by the mercurial Michel Faber is basically The Da Vinci Code with gags - and bile. What he did for the Victorian novel in The Crimson Petal and the White (2003) - rethinking and recasting it - Faber now does for the bestselling books du jour.

Theo Griepenkerl, a pathetic, overweight academic from the Toronto Institute of Classical Studies, is visiting a looted museum in Iraq. A bomb goes off and Theo discovers, hidden inside a bas-relief sculpture, nine papyrus scrolls written in Aramaic. Theo just happens to be one of the world's leading scholars of Aramaic. It seems like a miracle: "The coincidence of finding an Aramaic memoir - to have it literally falling at his feet - at a highly dramatic moment in his life, was too astounding to ignore."

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