The Book Against God: A Novel
by James Wood
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Book Summary Information
Author: James WoodEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2004-06-01
ISBN: 0312422512
Number of pages: 272
Publisher: Picador
Book Reviews of The Book Against God: A Novel
Book Review: Pilgrim's Regress
Summary: 3 Stars
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.
Summary of The Book Against God: A Novel
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.
Comic, edgy, lyrical, and indignant Bunting gives the term unreliable narrator a new twist with his irrepressible incapacity to tell the truth.
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