“There is never any pure reproduction of reality because reality is just what it is,” he explained. Eusebio knows well that “every dead body is a book with a story to tell, each organ a chapter, the chapters united by a common narrative,” and the autopsy is a evocative scene of magical realism, the only true, “in a technical sense, magical realism in the book,” said Martel. He died of grief and she has come to the pathologist to see what is inside his body. The second Maria arrives at Eusebio's door carrying her dead husband inside a suitcase. (Agatha Christie) this new apostle answers the same questions Jesus answered: 'What are we to do with death?'” If we set the murder mystery of Agatha Christie atop the Gospels and shine a light through, we see correspondence and congruence, agreement and equivalence. “The only modern genre that plays on the same high moral register as the Gospels is the lowly-regarded murder mystery. Among them, she compares English author Agatha Christie to Jesus: The first Maria is Eusebio's talkative, clever and dead wife who philosophizes while her adoring husband listens, fascinated by her strikingly unusual ideas. Tragedy travels by way of suitcase, nearly 40 years later, into the second part of the book, “Homeward.” It arrives with one of two characters named Maria, who visit a pathologist, Eusebio Lozora. Those parables, like The High Mountains of Portugal, require unpacking, just like a suitcase.

The Apostle Paul was the first to write down the narrative of Christ’s story, more than 10 years after his death, but before then, it was told by word of mouth, said Martel. The Gospels, told through parable, are truncated stories, manifested in this form as a result of oral storytelling. He not only visited a car museum in England, viewed two autopsies in Saskatoon and travelled the roads his protagonists travel, but also read books about chimpanzees, every Agatha Christie novel from 1920 to 1938, and read and re-read Paul’s letters, many Christian texts and the Gospels with a particular focus on The Gospel of Mark. In writing this book, Martel researched at length. “I see all these religions as metaphors of the same mystery that we cannot fully grasp…I do choose to believe that all of this material reality, underpinning it, there is some greater meaning,' he explained. Like many people in the secular mainstream, Martel used to “despise religion,” and still “hates the Catholic church for its homophobia, its sexism, the deep sexism (that is) truly offensive, (and) its paternalism.” He now however, has come to respect some aspects of it: 'We are killed off by life,” he said simply. The life of Jesus resembles all our lives, he added, in the sense that all are born, try their best, and then are then crucified at the end when their time has come.

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