Adam Nicolson: Power and Glory

Reviewed by PETER CALDER*

Not for nothing has the translation of the Bible commissioned by King James I of England (VI of Scotland) become known as the Authorised Version.

It was undertaken at the behest of a king who asserted his near-divinity and was intended as "God's version", steering a stately course between the ideologically pure Geneva Bible, written by puritanical Calvinists 50 years earlier, and the inaccessible Catholic "Elizabethan" Bible of 1568, whose aim seemed to be to reinforce the remoteness of the church hierarchy.

The intentions of the roughly 50-strong team whose 350 scholar-years of work produced the King James Bible is nicely underlined in this book's American title. God's Secretaries carries at once the sense of mission and the precise, dogged labour which sustained the enterprise, but also the determination to achieve a transcendent purity of expression. It's hard to understand why it's been released as Power and Glory, with its uncomfortable echoes of a novel about faith in crisis.

The book is a consistently exultant celebration of language and a searching analysis of the way subsequent versions of the Bible - in particular the New English Bible's "descent to dreariness [and] banality" - have flattened the text.

Nicolson, a grandson of Vita Sackville-West, brilliantly evokes the political and social context in which the AV was written - the faded glory of the Elizabethan age and the scheming competition between different factions of the church, each keen to catch the king's ear. He brings the version's authors brilliantly to life, fleshed out from letters and secretarial fragments, but most of all he celebrates the "precious Jacobean alloy, the fusion of light and richness" which distinguishes the language of King James.

He finds oddities - notably a chaotic printing process which resulted in one 1631 edition of the translation containing the commandment "thou shalt commit adultery". But what impresses most is the way he delves into the minutiae of the translation process to look at the importance of a single "now" (which gives "an extra flick both of vitality and engagement to the verse") or applauding the use of the word "face" in the Bible's second verse, which has the spirit of God moving "upon the face of the waters".

The word, he remarks, has "a mysterious and ghostly humanity to it" and carries the "baroque suggestion, a scene from Michelangelo or Blake that the face of God is reflected in [the water]."

That love of language drives a marvellous book. Without this document, the words of the Gettysburg address, JFK, Martin Luther King and Churchill would not resound in modern ears. It is an exact anatomy and a triumphant celebration of one of the great treasures of European civilisation.

HarperCollins, $54.95


* Peter Calder is a former Herald writer.