Author: Nick Laird
Publisher: Viking
Pages: 336
Reading Modern Gods helped me
realise the human tendency to make gods out of our beliefs and how
disillusioned we feel at their breakdown.
The novel begins with two men
opening fire mindlessly in a pub called The Day’s End, unleashing death and
mayhem.
Part I – Six Nothings
introduces us to married couple Judith and Kenneth Donnelley. They have three
children, Liz, Alison and Spencer. Judith suffers from a tumour, that the kids
don’t know about.
Liz, never-married, is invited by the British Broadcasting Corporation to be a presenter for an episode of a documentary, The Latest of the Gods, to be featured on a religious
movement in New Ulster, Papua New Guinea (PNG). A woman called
Belef has combined Christianity with the local myths it has displaced to found
a new movement called the Story.
At first unsure about whether
she wants to do the job, Liz decides to go ahead when she learns that her
much-younger boyfriend is two-timing her with a man.
Meanwhile, Alison,
divorced from her first husband, the verbally abusive Bill, is now marrying the
gentle Stephen.
In Part – II, In the Way that
Fire Wanders, we see how things get out of hand.
On the morning after the
wedding, the family learns that Stephen is one of the ruthless killers of the
pub massacre. Now that her marriage is another sham, Alison begins to feel
complicit in her husband’s crime.
In PNG, Liz, her producer
Margo and cameraman Paolo are caught up in the conflict arising out of the pull
that that both Belef and Josh and Jess Werner, the missionaries trying to bring
Christianity to the locals, exert.
Even as both gods appear
false, the god that is Stephen, as well as the god of Belef’s Story, Judith
too realizes that her marriage is not as stable as she thinks it is.
The chapters alternate
between Stephen and Alison on their honeymoon and Liz and party in PNG with
Belef. Alison is playing make-believe with her husband. Liz is doing it as a TV
presenter.
Additionally, in PNG, the
rise of Belef’s The Story is juxtaposed against the New Truth Mission of the
Werners.
The story of the Donnelleys
is interspersed with short third person accounts of those who were killed at the
pub. There was something touchingly sad about those lives cut short, just as
you are getting to know them.
Slowly the intricacies and
instabilities of the family relationships come to the fore.
Judith’s diagnosis brings her
into the spotlight like an ornament gathering dust in the back of a cabinet
now unexpectedly appraised at some fantastic value, and brought out to the
light of the mantelpiece… But here too the dust alighted.
Liz has always felt outside
the family circle, an adult in a scale model. Returning home for the wedding, she
feels uncomfortable with her place in the family unit. Everything is the same,
and yet not. Home was like climbing into a suit that was made of your own body,
and it looked like you, and it smelled like you, and it moved its hand when you
told it to, but it wasn’t you, not now.
The sisters’ relationships is
a strange one. Each pities the other, but in her smug self-satisfaction of
having two children and a husband, even if he is the second, Alison pities Liz harder, longer, louder.
Some lines demanded that you
re-read and savour them.
The broadband in the
Donnelley home is too slow. It is not feasible to download photos, not in human
time. In geological time, maybe, or if you experienced the world as an oak
tree did.
The description of TV
producer Margo: The trick was to keep her on a casual level of intimacy, at a
friendly arm’s length. If you wandered off the main road with her, you faced
the real risk of being lost for some time in the outskirts of her complicated
backstory… You wanted to keep her star in your orbit, but not so close as to
get burned up, not so distant as to lose all light and heat.
Liz’s theory about the origin
of religion is fascinating. It was no surprise that the deserts of the Middle
East had given birth to the three big monotheisms. A landscape’s character
directed the minds of those born in it, their imagination, their interactions
with the seen and unseen. Out there in the Kansan prairies – or the wilderness
of sand where Jesus fasted forty days and nights – it was just you and God
under the sky, staring down the huge horizon. It was unilinear. It was strict.
It was personal. The jungle spoke a different tongue. It talked of fertility,
the immanence of objects, the many spirits lurking in the trees and ferns and
rocks and rivers. There was constant activity, displacement. It reminded one of
mortality, the endless simmer of rot and renewal. And where was her own Ireland
in the system? A tidal zone. A recurrence of eternal folds. Early mist rising
up like all the ghosts in the hollows of the fields.
It was interesting to have
whataboutery described as Northern Ireland’s favorite form of rhetoric. I
thought that was India’s invention in our current political and social climate.
Returning from PNG to
Ireland, Liz tries to put the intensity of pain she has experienced behind her. How small the body felt for what it had to hold; memory and experience and
pain. How continually one must fold and trim the soul.
Alison must do likewise. Her
happiness is now forever clouded over by her pain. Outside the large sky was
full of stars – exit wounds or promises of some greater light behind the
black.
The sisters finally have
something in common, the compromise that is their mother’s life. In the end,
they all accept their gods, even when they turn out to be broken, because as
Liz says, What fetish gods the Donnellys were! They’d stay in a marriage so as
not to waste the cargo of a fondue set.
(I got a free ARC from FirstToRead).
No comments:
Post a Comment