James Wood: The Book Against God

Amardeep Singh: The real issues in James Wood's novel, 'The Book Against God'.

James Wood is best known as a book critic. Here is a recent LRB piece that caused a bit of a stir amongst literary bloggers a couple of months ago; and here is a review of a book on the history of the King James Bible from the New Yorker last year. 'The Book Against God' is Wood's first novel. A collection of reviews of the book, most of them lukewarm or positive, can be found here.

The plot: a graduate student in Philosophy at University College London, desultorily writing a dissertation, steadily reveals himself to be a believer in God despite strenuously (and sometimes embarrassingly) imposing his atheism on friends, girlfiend, and family. Actually he is not writing the diss. at all, but instead composing a collection of quotes and arguments pointing at the absence of God in the world, a "Book Against God." In fact, however, Wood wants to show that Tom Bunting's attachment to his father (a Vicar at the church of a small
northern English town) carries within it the seeds of a kind of belief.I can see why the novel was dismissed by some critics -- it has flaws.
But I still enjoyed it for its many arguments and insights.