Review
An intellectual's revolt against the faith of his father becomes a disabling shaping force in this talky if intriguing first novel. British (now Washingtonian) literary critic Wood (The Broken Estate, 1999) has as his narrator an Englishman by the name of Thomas Bunting, a philosophy professor who moonlights briefly as an obituary writer-explaining missed deadlines by citing the recent death of his father, a respected priest in a rural northern England village. But Peter Bunting is at this point decidedly alive-and the aforementioned falsehood is only one of hundreds concocted by his son, who's not so much a Doubting Thomas, or even a committed atheist, as a lifelong "evader" of truths that confirm his father's confident worldview and seem to limit Thomas's own possibilities. This makes the story sound tedious, which it frequently is, owing to a plethora of conversations between Thomas and his estranged wife Jane (who loves him but hates his duplicity); his childhood friend Max Thurlow, a newspaper "pundit" (who "was succeeding for both of us"); assorted colleagues and acquaintances, and-interestingly-Terry Upsher, a semiliterate workingman whose simple honesty suggests the nature Thomas has resolutely rejected. The title denotes a book (his "BAG") that Thomas is supposedly writing (instead of completing his long-aborning Ph.D.), which argues from design that the horrors of existence prove that whatever God created them isn't worth worshipping. This is of course unoriginal, but it's still the insistent nerve center here, particularly in climactic scenes wherein Thomas is all but silenced (if not persuaded) by his father's lucid eloquence (" . . . if you take God away from the world, the world is no less . . . painful or sinful or unsaved. It is simply painful and sinful . . . without the hope of salvation or succour"). Not really successful as a novel, but literate, provocative, and at times quite surprisingly moving. (Kirkus Reviews)
Product Description
Thomas Bunting, the charming, chaotic, and deeply untruthful narrator of James Wood's wonderful first novel, is in despair. His marriage is disintegrating, and his academic career is in ruins: instead of completing his philosophy PhD (still unfinished after seven years), he is secretly writing what he hopes will be his masterwork, a vast atheistic project he has privately entitled 'The Book Against God'. But when his father is suddenly taken ill Thomas returns home, to the tiny village in the north of England where he grew up, and where his father still works as a parish priest. Thomas hopes that at home he may finally be able to communicate honestly with his father, a brilliant and formidable Christian example, and sort out his wayward life. But Thomas is a chronic liar, as well as an atheist, and he finds, instead, that once at home he only falls back into the disastrous and evasive patterns of his childhood years. James Wood's novel brings a new comic voice to British fiction - edgy, lyrical, intellectual and passionate. The Book Against God explores questions of belief and unbelief, truth and lies, the relation of father and son, and husband and wife, in a tone that is at once poignant and funny. Above all, it introduces readers to the irrepressible presence of its narrator, Thomas Bunting, liar, doubter, and the strangest philosopher in contemporary fiction.
by James Wood
by James Wood
by James Wood
by Vasily Grossman
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DVD ~ Tony Leung Chiu Wai
