The Book Against God Revisited
Fiction, being the game of not quite, is the place of not-quite-belief. Precisely what is a danger in religion is the very fabric of fiction. In religion, a belief that is only “as if” is either the prelude to a loss of faith, or an instance of bad faith (in both senses of the phrase). If religion is true, one must believe. And if one chooses not to believe, one’s choice is marked under the category of a refusal, and is thus never really free: it is the duress of a recoil. Once religion has revealed itself to you, you are never free. In fiction, by contrast, one is always free to choose not to believe, and this very freedom, this shadow of doubt, is what helps to constitute fiction’s reality.
– James Wood, “Introduction: The Limits of Not Quite,” in The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief, page xii.
I begin with this quote because I think it explains the context for my disappointment with Wood’s Book Against God. In the same introduction, he makes the claim that “it was not just science but perhaps the novel itself which helped to kill Jesus’s divinity, when it gave us a new sense of the real, a new sense of how the real disposes itself in a narrative—and then in turn a new skepticism toward the real as we encounter it in narrative” (page xiv).
If you had handed me The Book Against God and told me that it was written by a Presbyterian minister, I would probably have thought it was brilliant. As I pointed out earlier, everything in this novel—the repulsive nature of lead character Thomas Bunting to the very admirable speech of Bunting’s father—seems to argue against atheists. I’ll go so far as to say that this novel suggest that atheists are childish men who want nothing more than freedom to do absolutely nothing, to sponge off their loved ones and shirk all forms of responsibility. Because that is how Thomas Bunting ends up being portrayed: his life doesn’t prove the validity of his atheistic faith.
Now, compare my impressions of the novel with the above quotes from The Broken Estate. How on earth do they mesh? This is what bothers me about the novel, it’s why I keep thinking about it despite feeling like I was tricked into finishing it. I simply cannot fathom what Wood was trying to communicate. Everything I’ve read about Wood has suggested that he is no fan of Christianity. Why then does this novel offer us a despicable germ of humanity as a spokesman for atheism?
Obviously, you can’t apply all characters universally. I understand that. But then, why are the most admirable characters in this novel Christians? Bunting’s father, for example, is a fine man: he is patient with his son’s irresponsibility, loves his son to the point of overindulgence, and humbles himself in the eyes of the world by fleeing the academy for a parish. Even Thomas’s ex-wife Jane—the object of all his desires, his only hope for a stable life—makes some claim to Christianity. The people that, like Bunting, hate God lead unhappy lives. Isn’t that weird?