God and Mr. Wood

Anyone who has read much of the last half-century of British fiction will perceive an echo of Kingsley Amis’s Jim Dixon–the hero of “Lucky Jim”–with his extensive repertoire of faces: his “Martian invader face,” his “shot-in-the-back face,” and so on. Thomas Bunting resembles Jim Dixon in other ways as well: He drifts along the margins of an English university, possesses a remarkable collection of tics and peculiarities (in Bunting’s case a mania for lying and a terror of insects), makes a mess of his relationships with women, and demonstrates a striking inability to get proper work done. In short, he’s immediately recognizable as a comic type, familiar not only from “Lucky Jim” but also from more recent books–Nelson Humboldt in James Hynes’s “The Lecturer’s Tale,” for instance.

Yet in the course of this novel, Thomas Bunting proves to be a richer character than most of these, and one of the achievements of “The Book Against God,” the literary critic James Wood’s first novel, is the gradual deepening of Thomas. Early in the novel it becomes clear that we will see few of the familiar landscapes of academic comedy: Thomas tells us that he teaches a few classes at University College, London, and that his students probably don’t respect him–and then he moves on, because that aspect of his life holds little interest for him. Looking back over the recent years of his life, Thomas says that he “moped and bunted”–his coinage–around his house in a dirty old paisley dressing gown, smoking, drinking, getting next to nothing done on his doctoral thesis; and yet all that scarcely matters, because he has bigger fish to fry. Thomas tells us these things, because unlike Amis and Hynes, James Wood allows his protagonist to use first-person narration–and allows him also much of Wood’s own extraordinary power of language.

James Wood is one of the finest essayists writing in English today, though his skill has been expressed almost always in book reviews. I groaned when I learned that he would be publishing a novel: Why is it, I thought, that the most masterful writers of nonfiction prose–Annie Dillard is a prime example–feel that they have at some point to turn to fiction? It is as though they do not think themselves serious writers until they can drop a novel on our laps. But if Wood’s reviews are about as “serious” as writing gets, he reveals to us in “The Book Against God” a real gift for fictional narration as well.

In his essays, Wood’s intelligence is manifested most purely in his metaphors–look, for instance, at how sharply he concludes a summary of Coleridge’s distinctive power: “The great pathos, tension, and comedy of Coleridge’s work is that he commits the sins against which he warns–and commits them while in the act of warning against them. It is why he is so likeable a Christian, despite his orthodoxy. His piety shares its borders with a rogue state.” In “The Book Against God” Wood yields this metaphorical gift to his protagonist. Thomas notes that in summer, the trees in a London park “exuberate into green, each leaf a delegate sent out by life.” When his wife Jane, in great anger, leaves him in his parents’ house in a northern village, he describes her departure thus: “The car bristled away over the gravel–that luxurious substance that bears no impress, retains no memory of wear.” And in one of the novel’s loveliest moments, Thomas hears on a recording of a piano sonata the faint noise of the pianist breathing: “it was the sound of hard work, but it was also the sound of existence itself–a man’s ordinary breath, the give and take of the organism, our colourless wind of survival, the zephyr of it all.”

Wood also seems to give Thomas some of his own history–growing up in a Christian family near Durham, an association with the great cathedral there (Thomas writes of listening to the choirboys sing; Wood was such a choirboy), a quite thorough loss of faith in adolescence–and this has led some of the novel’s reviewers to assume that the book is rather straightforwardly autobiographical. But one should be careful, for the deviations from Wood’s life are noteworthy. Wood has written movingly about the mark his upbringing has left upon him, despite, or because of, his rejection of his childhood faith: “The child of evangelicalism, if he does not believe, inherits nevertheless a suspicion of indifference. He is always evangelical.” But Thomas’s father Peter, a professor of theology turned Anglican priest, dismisses what he calls the “intellectually vacant, crudely evangelical approach,” and Thomas is not even sure whether Peter believes, in a recognizably substantive way, the creed that he affirms. It falls to a former colleague of Peter’s to assure Thomas, “I think he’s a pretty solid believer. I’m sure Peter would say, ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth.'”

This point bears emphasis because otherwise it might be too easy to assume that this novel is itself a “book against God.” It is not, at least not simply; it strikes me as virtually impossible that anyone should be moved to atheism by Thomas’s story, and certainly Wood makes no efforts to convince his readers–if anything, he stretches in the opposite direction. Often, when Thomas is supposed to be working on his dissertation, he turns his attention instead to a lengthy brief for atheism that gives this novel its title: his “Book Against God,” or “BAG” for short. We see a few excerpts from Thomas’s BAG, and if they are not especially persuasive, there are some good novelistic reasons for that. Some years ago, in an essay on Albert Camus, Wood noted that “the fiercest objectors to Christianity are often themselves believers; their belief is doubt-intoxicated, while by contrast the atheists are merely drunk on certainty.” Thomas may well be such an atheist: Timothy, the same man who testifies to Peter’s status as a “pretty solid believer,” responds to one of Thomas’s condemnations of religious belief by saying, “What interests me is your certainty.”

And yet Thomas’s certainty, as one might guess, has its hidden fragilities. Timothy tells Thomas that God “palpably does exist for you . . . because you can’t stop talking about ‘God.'” Thomas’s ongoing BAG is evidence of unfinished business; indeed, this novel itself constantly explores all the unfinished crucial business in Thomas’s life: his ongoing quarrel with Christianity, yes, but also his broken marriage and his complex but essentially loving relationship with his father. Wood captures the nuances of Thomas’s ongoing negotiations with his life; and we leave the book with a sense that those negotiations will indeed be ongoing.

Likewise, these negotiations are subject to a frightening range of contingencies. Wood’s novel seeks to capture the thread of the contingent in the weave of experience. Writing about Ian McEwan, Wood once expressed some reservations about the masterful control McEwan exercises over his characters’ lives: “More often than not, one emerges from his stories as from a vault, happy to breathe a more accidental air.” One of the finest things about James Wood’s “The Book Against God” is its careful presentation of the “accidental air” that we all breathe every day.

At the end of the book, we leave Thomas in medias res, wondering whether the accidents that await him will bring him the reconciliations that, with most of his heart, he wants–even bring him, perhaps, back to the God whom he refuses to worship and with whom he hopes, someday, to be finally and irrevocably done.

Alan Jacobs teaches English at Wheaton College in Illinois. His most recent book is “A Theology of Reading: The Hermeneutics of Love.”