[Behold the Man] is wildly ambitious, irritating, uneven, and very promising for [Michael Moorcock's] future. As a temporarily exhausted science-fiction addict, I have been waiting for a long time for the form to grow up, to achieve the leap from entertainment to art. There have been signs lately that this might be happening and Mr Moorcock, in Behold the Man, comes tantalisingly close.

The theme is fascinating, a genuine attempt to marry the orthodox novel of psychological investigation with science fiction and historical speculation. Karl, your well-known hero with identity problems, travels in a time machine to ancient Palestine. He falls in with John the Baptist, seeks Christ and finds him as a hunchbacked congenital imbecile. This passage, and Karl's subsequent assumption of Christ's identity, passion and Crucifixion, could have been ridiculous, even offensive. It says much for Mr Moorcock that they are not.

Less successful is Karl's own psychological history shown in flashbacks which rudely interrupt the far more gripping narrative of his adventures in Palestine. Childhood experiences, seduction by a naughty vicar, a superficial equation of sex with religion and (naturally) a disastrous later love life, are undercooked Freudian ham. Behold the Man is an ambitious failure, patchy, skimped and exciting. There is a powerful imagination here and an original, disturbing point of view.

Janice Elliott, "Present & Past," in New Statesman (© 1969 The Statesman & Nation Publishing Co. Ltd.), Vol. 77, No. 1986, April 4, 1969, p. 486.∗