World Famous Comics: The Book Against God: A Novel
The Book Against God: A Novel
By: James Wood Publisher: Picador Average Rating: Binding: Paperback Label: Picador Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 272 Publication Date: June 01, 2004
Thomas Bunting while neglecting his philosophy Ph.D., still unfinished after seven years, is secretly writing what he hopes will be his masterwork--a vast atheistic project to be titled The Book Against God. In despair over his failed academic career and failing marriage, Bunting is also enraged to the point of near lunacy by his parents’ religiousness. When his father, a beloved parish priest, suddenly falls ill, Bunting returns to the Northern village of his childhood. Bunting’s hopes that this visit might enable him to finally talk honestly with his parents and sort out his wayward life, are soon destroyed.
Comic, edgy, lyrical, and indignant Bunting gives the term unreliable narrator a new twist with his irrepressible incapacity to tell the truth.
Pilgrim's Regress Raised in an evangelical Anglican family, James Wood - a successful literary critic who teaches at Harvard and is a New Yorker staff writer - discusses the failure of Christian apologetics to justify belief in a God who allows so much suffering and evil to exist in The New Yorker: "Holiday in Hellmouth," a review of Bart Ehrman's God's Problem: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2008/06/09/080609crbo_books_wood. The feckless protagonist of Wood's 2003 novel, The Book against God, is hard to identify with the high-achieving Wood, but they share a compulsion to argue against theodicy - the branch of theology devoted to justifying God's ways to man - from the Old Testament to Kierkegaard. Tom Bunting is a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy with a dissertation he cannot finish. It bores him, as does the prospect of a career of teaching and research that finishing the degree might lead to. He spends his time on another project instead - an endless series of screeds against the God he was raised to believe in, quarreling with writers who try to justify Him. The inadequacy of Christian apologists to make a watertight argument in God's defense is proof, in Tom's eyes, that Christianity is absurd and that God does not exist. If Christianity is to be accepted at all, it must be done on faith alone, and faith is what Tom sorely lacks. The comedy is mostly in the early chapters, as Tom lays out his predicament - unable to finish his degree, separated from his wife, lying habitually to get out of scrapes, but whose lies are catching up with him. As we meet his wife, Jane, his few friends, and finally his parents - all of whom are concerned for him and wanting him to grow up and face responsibilities - the comedy drops away, and the tone becomes more serious. His father, particularly, is an impressive man who about the time Tom was born gave up a career as a theology professor to become a parish priest. Like Chaucer's Parson, Peter Bunting lives the gospel in his daily life, ministers to his flock, and is kindly and cheerful into the bargain. The only real issue Tom can find to differ with this loving father is their inability to agree theologically. Why do some children raised in a faith take it on so easily, while others rebel? There's no question here of abuse, physical or emotional. Tom believes he had a happy childhood, if a bit of a lonely one. His parents' marriage is exceptionally loving, and he too was loved as a child. Yet he exhibits the traits of many children of successful parents (Bunting pere is successful in his own terms - a beloved pastor who genuinely embodies the virtues of the faith he ardently espouses). Tom fails to measure up to his father, or to meet his parents' gentle expectations that he will share their faith. Instead he quarrels incessantly with that faith - not face-to-face, since he can't bear to hurt his father - but behind his back, in his unpublishable book against his father's God. This is an incomplete summary of a book that is full of incidents and nicely drawn characters. Wood has a knack for metaphor and simile that Aristotle says is the one part of a poet's craft that cannot be learned. Anyone who has had a half-finished thesis hanging over his head will recognize the sort of limbo it puts one in. The novel is hardly an advertisement for abandoning religious belief. Rather it is a wistful statement of someone who sees the horror of existence in this world, but is unable to console himself with visions of the next. This all makes the book sound somber, but it is not. It is lightened with amusing portraits of Tom's friends and relations, and in later chapters set in the parsonage in the North of England, in Peter Bunting's parish outside the city of Durham, a gallery of local country "types" is diverting. Inevitably hints of allegory creep in - doubting Thomas, a man called Peter, the rhythms of the Christian calendar - but if some sort of Pilgrim's Progress is suspected, there is no resolution. Without redemption, this world is absurd and awful. But redemption is a fairy tale that cannot stand up to scrutiny.
Not For Readers Expecting A Good Story The plot in The Book Against God seems simply an armature, on which the author has molded his ideas. The characters are also formed to fortify the primacy of ideas and witty lines. The main character, Thomas Bunting, has lost the garden of childhood and with it his innocence. He, therefore, cannot take the leap of faith that his theologian father has. Quite aptly, Tommy becomes a philosopher. Although he will never finish his Ph.D., the occupation allows him to become a "Doubting Thomas." Opposing her husband's weak skepticism, Thomas's wife Jane, a musician, insists on conducting life with a measured rationalism. Of course, Jane's father, who left his legal practice early because of nervous problems, seems to approve of Thomas. Other views are offered by Max, the pundit, and his very academic parents, and so forth. The book is really quite funny, and is about the nature of truth as much as it is about belief. Perhaps this novel should be classified as a metaphysical novel.
Not a novel of ideas but ideas trying to make a novel The fulsome reactions to this brave attempt by a sensible critic of other's novels who tries to write his own fiction same make me wonder if some of Wood's readers have forgotten to distinguish form from content. True, this storyline has marvellously observed moments, for me especially in the observation of the narrator's friend Max's academic parents in their separate studies, waiting impatiently for human contacts to ebb so they can get back to their research.
But the arguments about atheism, agnosticism, and theology are scattershot and frankly rather disappointing, given their lack of originality. I expected more from this book, but instead of a sustained assault by a young thinker against too comfortable assumptions, instead I received a few hundred pages of a story that moved in fits and starts, with remarkably few interesting scenes, characters, or developments. I do admit that around the halfway point, the conversation between Tom and Colin does perk up the philosophical underpinnings that stay far too buried for most of the narrative. It barely earns two stars, only for attempts at insight that occasionally prove moving, if far too fleetingly. A glimpse of Wood's promise does emerge at the funeral of one of the main characters and the eulogy attempted by another (no plot spoilers) make for a finely tragicomic scene in the tradition of Waugh or Kingsley Amis.
But the whole musical realm within which Jane is shown takes up energy that would have better been spent on Tom's own musings, if they were to convince us at all. A few potshots at Kierkegaard's name and admittedly frustrating aphorisms do not make much of a case for his "book against God" project. Now, is this rather Wood's point? The open-ended denouement may support a rejection of Tom's ambitions.
If so, then these 250 pp. could have been better condensed and tightened into a fine novella. Wood gives you no real weight for his protagonist, who appears far too closely drawn on his own early experiences. This muddled semi-autobiographical portrait of a rebel academic shows only intermittent control of the fictional process. Without his previous reputation at the Guardian and New Republic, I wonder if this would have been published. Given the evidence of this debut, Wood's a better critic than creator of weighty fiction.
reminiscent of Waugh It's a heavy comparison to be sure, but I couldn't help thinking how similar Wood's writing style is to Evelyn Waugh's. I've lost count of how many times I've been told a novel is going to be funny, or that the book is a "comic novel," and it produced a nary a snicker. But aside from Waugh and probably Kurt Vonnegut, Wood's novel is one of the funniest I've read in recent memory. Of course, this achievement is all the more remarkable since Wood's book is chiefly a thoughtful meditation on religion, belief, and, most of all, father-son relationships. How many writers can say they've written a top-notch philosophical novel that makes one laugh out loud? The more I read this book and began to realize what an achievement it was, the more annoyed I became as I recalled the snarky reviews it received. There were many positive reviews and, sure, Wood is well known for his own occasionally mean-spirited reviews, although they are always unfailingly thoughtful and critical for good reason (at least in Wood's mind). I remember reading one review that went something like, "Wood's `The Book Against God,' is merely that, a book that tries to convince the reader there is no God." Um, no. Not even close. What this book is, more than anything, is an intelligently philosophical look at a father-son relationship where neither party is at fault, intimacy is painfully difficult to come by, and philosophical differences get in the way of familial love. It would seem to me that any review of this book by a professional reviewer that is entirely negative is the result of someone trying to dish out some kind of payback. The immaturity of such an act strikes me as an act by someone who either takes him of herself entirely too seriously or has enjoyed an extraordinarily easy life in which he or she has nothing more important to get upset about. Literary journalism and journalism in general has always been a profession where thick skin is a necessity, and if a reviewer doesn't understand this, perhaps he or she should consider another line of work. The biggest shame of this type of attitude may be that it prevents one from learning from Wood's reviews, which never fail in this regard whether they are positive or negative. I think many fiction writers could also learn from Wood's splendid novel.
Intelligent and entertaining An atheistic and rather seedy son and his relationship with (principally) his attractive clergyman father. Superb, inventively and wittily phrased descriptions of a large cast of characters and of places; intelligent conversations about belief and non-belief; a moving coda (not quite at the end of the book). Because the chronology is all mixed up, it really needs to be read twice.
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