1 of 3
by James Wood Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003 272 pp.; $23 |
James Wood has established himself as one of the most influential critics in the English-speaking world. His first book, The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature on Belief (1999), included an account of his upbringing in a strongly evangelical British family and his loss of faith in his teens, and skepticism toward religion in general and Christianity in particular is a recurring theme in the brilliant essay-reviews he contributes to The New Republic and elsewhere. It is no surprise, then, that his first novel contains a strident polemic against religious belief.
Indeed, at first glance, The Book Against God may offer little to recommend itself to Christian readers. It depicts no conversions and answers none of the profound and unsettling questions it poses. Yet it presents a compelling and powerful portrait of religious belief.
We are introduced to Thomas Bunting, the novel's narrator, four months after the death of his father, an exuberant Anglican priest. Thomas' wife, a talented pianist, has left him, and he has abandoned a Ph.D. program that he had begun at University College, London, eight years earlier. He has little to show for himself, besides four large notebooks of theological and anti-theological arguments and the story of his unhappy life. He considers the notebooks, a sprawling treatise he calls the "Book Against God," his life's work. But his story isn't as much an argument against God as it is a memorial of his father, Peter.
Thomas grew up in the cloistered, northern English village of Sundershall, "barely more than a single corridor of low cottages opening out onto the green release of a lawn shaded by three or four unremarkable trees." Here, in the small parish church, his father dispensed "a Christianity that was inseparable from life. The rhythms of the village, and of the seasons, were also the rhythms of my father's ministry: rising Easter, and sun-favoured summer, and census-gathering Christmas, when, as if in mimicry of the story of Caesar Augustus, all the villagers came to be counted and for once the church was truly full."
Peter Bunting was "a great Christian optimist. … He was very erudite, and rather prided himself on his worldly sense of humor, aware that this was rare in priests. For instance, he wrote book reviews for a journal of theology in London, which sent him advance copies of the books. He had removed a sticker from one of these and glued it to the favorite of his six different bibles. It read: 'This is an advance copy sent in lieu of proof.' " This, Thomas informs us, was "characteristic of his humour and of his faith. He was hospitable to all enemies."
Thomas never understands the impetus for such hospitality, which he considers dishonest. He is particularly annoyed by his father's evasiveness in their arguments. Thomas complains that his father "aerated his faith with so many little holes, so much flexibility and doubt and easygoing tolerance, that he simply disappeared down one of the holes." Thomas wants more from his father than banter. He wants something solid, something absolute, against which he can define himself and his views.
Nevertheless, he reveres his father's learning. "Growing up, I feared him," he writes, "for there was nothing that he didn't know. The stock of his knowledge was continually bubbling, and any novelty or spice could be added to it, without a fundamental change to the flavour. An extraordinarily sure mind, calmly enriching itself, very flexible and alert." In many ways, he wants to be like his father, but he tires of trying: "I want to be what a nineteenth-century thinker called an athlete of reason. But my father always made me feel, as it were, fat and short of breath, because he himself was a kind of athlete of reason while simultaneously a knight of faith."
share this page
RSS Feed
