Placing faith in the power of the novel

On the scene but not a literary personality, writing with passionate intelligence and richly metaphorical style, James Wood has ignored the opaque aridity of literary theory and insisted on the human relevance of classic and modern literature. Born in 1965, he grew up in an evangelical Christian family in Durham, England, and sang in the cathedral choir. As a teenager, he tore himself away from belief in God and soothed his restless soul with art. After taking a degree at Jesus College, Cambridge, he became a full-time literary journalist for the Guardian, the London Review of Books and the New Republic, and now lives in Washington, D.C. “The Book Against God” is his first novel.

Wood set forth his aesthetic and religious principles in his first book, “The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief” (1999). He likes realistic fiction, enriched with precise visual details. His method is to ask: “What is this art like? What does it resemble? How can it best be described?” A vivid writer, he calls a scene in Philip Roth’s “Sabbath’s Theater” “a chandelier of gathered moments” and defines D.H. Lawrence’s delicate descriptions in “Twilight in Italy” as “hidden sermons whose quarry is the secret of knowledge itself.” Wood admires bold exploratory novels, like Melville’s and Mann’s. He insists that “fiction must not stroke the known but distress the undiscovered.” The novel, he writes, “is able to test, and enrich, our powers of sympathy.” Like God on Judgment Day, he separates the saved (Gogol, Chekhov, Lawrence and Woolf) from the damned (DeLillo, Updike, Toni Morrison and Julian Barnes).

The big gun in Wood’s critical armory is theology. The autobiographical sections of “The Broken Estate” set out ideas he develops in his novel. He asserts that our religious belief was broken in the mid-19th century, when “the supposition that religion was a set of divine truth-claims, and that the Gospel narratives were supernatural reports” began to collapse; when “historical biblical criticism began to treat the Bible as if it were a biography or even a novel.” A key argument in both his criticism and his novel is that there is no correspondence between religion and morality, that “God-fearing Europe ... does not seem to have been obviously more moral than God-questioning Europe” after Voltaire and Hume. The hero of Wood’s novel, who thinks the Bible is merely a collection of myths and that religion does not improve human behavior, wrestles with the consequences of abandoning religious belief.

Sustained by his iconoclastic heroes Nietzsche and Camus, Wood rejects Christianity in “The Broken Estate.” He cannot accept “the problem of evil and suffering in the world, the senseless difficulty of faith, the cruelty of heaven and hell, the paganism of Jesus’ ‘sacrifice.’ ... Either God cannot control this evil (and then he is not all powerful) or, in some way, he wants it to exist (and he is not good).” While Wood has lost faith in religion, he still believes in literature. For him, the religious and the novelistic impulse are the same. Fiction demands belief, and novelists “ask us to validate the reality of [their] writing by believing it.”

Wood’s religious background and north of England origins, as well as his critical and autobiographical essays, set the stage for his episodic first-person novel. The narrator and central character, Tom Bunting, reacts against the big lie of Christianity, forced upon him as a child, by becoming, as an adult, a chronic, unregenerate and self-defeating liar. Without belief in anything, his mind and heart are in chaos. “The Book Against God” thriftily recycles not only theological arguments but also specific statements and images from “The Broken Estate.” In both the essays and the novel, Wood and his fictional character have had a happy childhood, and as choirboys wore black capes and tasseled mortarboards; in both books Wood writes of a household as solemn “as if a doctor were visiting,” of a confused “chameleon who finds himself on a tartan picnic rug” and of a church-going lady who walks with three sticks. Both books end with rhetorical questions.

In an appreciative New Yorker essay on the Catholic fiction of J.F. Powers, Wood recalls that he “grew up among priests; they were stationed throughout my family, as uncles and cousins. A certain kind of Church of England rectory became as familiar to me as my bedroom.” “The Book Against God” is an Anglican (not evangelical) novel with the clerical background of George Eliot and Anthony Trollope (alluding to Trollope’s novels, he names one character Canon Palliser), of Barbara Pym and A.N. Wilson. The novel is set in London and in a village near Durham, and Tom shares the surname of the Northumberland poet Basil Bunting, whose archive is in Durham.

A graduate student in London, Tom neglects his dissertation on the Epicureans and modern thought (he’s Epicurean only in his taste for luxuries) to work secretly on an atheistic tract, “The Book Against God,” a book within the book. But his obsession ruins both his marriage and his academic career. Tom -- reluctant to bathe but awash in self-pity (his wife seduces him in the bath on their wedding night) -- sees the world “as a matter of strategies, techniques, tricks.” When Tom’s father, an Anglican parish priest, has a heart attack, he leaves London to return to his childhood village and hopes, with his father’s help, to repair his disintegrating life.

In “The Way of All Flesh,” Samuel Butler wrote that “the best liar is he who makes the smallest amount of lying go the longest way.” This supposes a purposeful lie, a limited departure from the norm. But Tom is a prodigious liar who wastes his lies as Onan spilled his seed. Though his father had proclaimed: “We absolutely will not have lies in this house,” Tom lies about everything, from the trivial to the profound: about doing his homework, studying Greek, finishing his dissertation, paying his bills, reclaiming his teaching job, believing in God, the death of his father and his desire for a child.

Tom’s lies -- comic in their absurdity, tragic in their consequences -- concern his faith, his work and his father, and reflect the larger lies of religion. The normally joyful and comforting “He is risen!” at an Easter service merely reminds him of one of his own lies. His wife, Jane, caught up in his mendacity, lies to his father about Tom’s atheism to spare the priest the fact of his son’s betrayal. When Tom tries to tell his father the truth about his unbelief, his father won’t accept it. Tom refers to his father’s funeral throughout the novel, but Wood cunningly saves it for the end and uses it as a sadly comic set piece. At the funeral service, Tom again tries to speak the truth about his relations with his father and loss of faith, but Jane and Canon Palliser force him to break off and make a humiliating descent from the pulpit. “You lie at the wrong times,” Jane shouts, “and then you tell the truth at the wrong times, and it’s all such a terrible mess.”

Tom’s lying makes marriage impossible. His attractive, talented and once-devoted wife gets furious with him for lying about not paying his bills and shouts: “The lie you are telling me to cover up the first lie is more repellent to me than the original one.” Tom’s marriage is contrasted not only to his parents’ harmonious union but also to the frequent yet amicable divorces of his “Uncle” Karl, a cultured, wealthy and generous German refugee from Nazism who’s made his fortune as an art dealer in England.

The most powerful scene takes place during Tom and Jane’s Christmas visit to his father’s home, where the couple attempt to conceive a child. As they make love, he fakes an orgasm and reassures her that he has ejaculated. When he confesses the next day, Jane, angry and wounded, insists on leaving. She banishes him from their comfortable London flat to a nightmarish room on a roaring main road until he can prove he’s no longer a liar. His attempt to be honest, she feels, doesn’t absolve him of the “disgusting lie you are being honest about.” Before Jane goes, she confirms Tom’s suspicions that his best friend, Max Thurlow, has taken pity on her and fallen in love with her, and that she found him very sympathetic. Jane swears they have not been lovers, and Tom both believes and suspects her. Tom’s tragicomic problem is that he’s rejected traditional religion and morality but has not replaced them with another set of values. His lies lead to a ruinous financial, emotional and intellectual decline. He can’t tell the difference -- in himself or others -- between petty white lies and profound deceit. Jane’s truth, like Tom’s confession, suggests that we may need the comforts of religion.

Wood’s novel is enriched by effective literary allusions: to Yeats’ “Easter 1916,” Wordsworth’s “Immortality Ode” and Henry Vaughan’s “Peace,” as well as by many flashes of wit. An organist sustains the final note “as if he had died on the job.” Tom’s father pastes on his Bible a sticker from a book he’s reviewing that reads: “This is an advance copy sent in lieu of a proof.” A woman wears black lace-up shoes “as if her feet are entombed in two little graves.” Streetlights gradually flicker on “all over town in amber hesitations.” Tom’s homecomings, after his father’s heart attack and, later on, for his funeral, are the most moving parts of the book. Both Tom and his kindly parents inevitably regress to outworn roles. “Harboured by my parents’ emotional stability,” he confesses, “their resourcefulness and Christian optimism, I should have been able to relax into their sanity. Instead, I felt reproached, tormented, seduced, frustrated by the easiness with which they seem to live.” He’s particularly tormented by a childhood memory of his grandmother’s funeral. Frightened by her death, he broke away from the mourners, was pursued by his father in a black cassock and ordered to “Come back to the grave”: forced to face both the reality of death and the promise of an afterlife.

Tom has two unsatisfactory discussions with his father, once a professor of theology, which repeat many of the arguments against religion in “The Broken Estate.” Unlike the absolutist Tom, his genial father doesn’t think belief and unbelief are opposites. He “aerated his faith with so many little holes, so much flexibility and doubt and easy-going tolerance” that he cannot be persuaded or punctured. In their second discussion, his father gives a doubt-filled, yet still unconvincing, defense of God. But he fails to explain the existence of evil and why, as Tom asked, “God hates us more than we can hate Him, and we do not deserve that hate.” In “The Ascent of F-6” (1937), Auden and Isherwood synthesize the insoluble argument about evil by writing: “True, Love finally is great, / Greater than all; but large the hate, / Far larger than Man can ever estimate.”

At the end of the novel, Tom remembers his grandmother’s funeral more positively and adopts the comforting belief that his father had held his hand when he forced him back to the open grave. He’d always wanted to hold his father’s warm hand and, in a grotesque parody of that wish, he pulls a photograph of his mother from the stiff, cold hand of his father’s corpse, and then pushes it back “against both the unwilling cold flesh ... and the hard silver cross.”

The novel ends, as it opened, with a biblical allusion. Tom begins his story by alluding to Matthew 26:75 (“Before the cock crows, thou shalt deny me thrice”) and to Peter (his father’s Christian name) by saying: “I denied my father three times, twice before he died, once afterwards.” He concludes by addressing the eternal question of why evil exists in the world and by turning Mark 9:44, “Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched” into “Wasn’t it an orchard, my childhood? But why, then, the worm? Why the worm? Tell me.” He finally realizes that the serpent will always be in Eden.

The witty, serious and intelligent “The Book Against God,” its theological meaning cradled in the arguments of “The Broken Estate,” matches Wood’s high critical standards. He can be self-indulgently, and perhaps appropriately, preachy, but he makes us care about and sympathize with Tom’s tormented soul and anxious search for truth. A liar, a parasite and a failure, Tom’s sad and comic character doesn’t change, but deepens as he suffers.