The Book Against God.(Book Review)

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 272 pages, $24

In Father and Son, Edmund Gosse's great memoir of his Victorian childhood, he writes of the event that first made him aware of his own self as independent being--and set him on the path away from the faith of his father: "My Mother always deferred to my Father, and in his absence spoke to me, as if he were all-wise. I confused him in some sense with God; at all events I believed that my Father knew everything and saw everything." One day, Gosse heard his father relate an anecdote of an occurrence at which mother and son had been present. "I remember turning quickly, in embarrassment, and looking into the fire. The shock to me was as that of a thunderbolt, for what my Father said 'was not true.'"

Gosse's work comes early to mind while reading James Wood's first novel, The Book Against God. Its narrator is a variation on the same theme. Thomas Bunting is the son of an Anglican minister. He is pursuing (and never quite completing) a Ph.D. in philosophy, but still regards his father with a combination of annoyance and awe. Though Thomas claims to have rarely seen him open a book, his father displays ready knowledge of everything from Montaigne to Schumann. "The mere display of that knowledge sufficed to subdue me," he writes, recalling a discussion they once had on some issue of morality:

 
   I must have said something rash, for Peter 
   calmly responded: "That's rather a postmodern 
   idea, I think, this collapsing of all 
   hierarchies." The argument ended there, for 
   suddenly he was describing my thoughts to 
   me! ... He didn't need to read any books of 
   postmodernism; he just absorbed this information 
   swiftly and mercilessly. 

For all his casual omniscience, however, what the father doesn't know is that his son has lost his faith. It is worse that that: He has become one of those who, in the words of Job, "desire to argue with God" and is secretly at work on a voluminous philosophical work he calls the "Book Against God" (his "BAG"). The BAG is Thomas's attempt to best his father and his faith; The Book Against God is the story of his frustration at his failure to do so.

Yet Wood's is not a merciless work like Father and Son or The Way of All Flesh, it is rather a deeply comic novel and a clever inversion of a conventional narrative. Peter Bunting is not overbearing or Puritanical. He is kind to the poor and lonely of his parish, married happily to Thomas's mother, and has a healthy sense of humor. (He has affixed to each of his bibles a sticker reading, "This is an advance copy sent in lieu of a proof.") Wood recognizes that for the past century disbelief in God has been an easier alternative than belief for an intelligent person, that there is no great heroism inherent in the decision to disbelieve, and that the loss of faith frequently entails the loss of a great many other valuable things, as well.

Wood is in the peculiar situation for a first-time novelist of having a great deal of information about his own beliefs, on issues of both metaphysics and the creation of ...