Difficult task … Neil Griffiths

BOOK OF THE DAY

Review

As a God Might Be by Neil Griffiths review – midlife crisis or the voice of God?

A man turns his life upside down in an ambitious, generous novel about the limits of faith and love

Lara Feigel
Saturday 25 November 2017

I

n an insistently rational, middle-class world, how do you respond if God appears unexpectedly in your life? Proctor McCullough is a successful professional, albeit in an unusual field – an “atrociologist”, he advises the government on probable mass behaviour amid disaster. He is unusually happy with his partner, Holly, and is a devoted father to their six-year-old twins. He has never been interested in religion before, preferring to channel his spirituality into the appreciation of art: Fyodor Dostoevsky, Wallace Stevens, Mark Rothko, JS Bach. But suddenly he experiences an unmistakable call to ready himself for God. “He was being presented with a rent in the world’s fabric and needed to make himself available for a gift that might be passed through.”

Abandoning his London home, McCullough decamps to the south coast where, single-handedly at first, he begins to build a church. He is dismissed by Holly and their friends as suffering from a peculiarly sanctimonious form of midlife crisis. “You’ve just taken the middle-class aspiration of ‘I want to move to the country’… and made it fantastically self-aggrandising.” Swiftly, he trades one family for another, gaining the allegiance of a group of four disenfranchised young locals, who are in need of a leader and a purpose.

As a God Might Be is an unusual phenomenon in contemporary British literature: a 600-page novel of faith and doubt, grappling earnestly with the question of man’s relationship to a real or imagined but definitely Christian God. It’s not quite as anachronistic as this sounds, because it’s also insistently of its time. The world here is one where terrorist attacks have rendered village Anglicanism trivial beside the rhetoric of religious fundamentalism; where apocalypse comes from human rather than godly acts. And if it’s self-consciously in the tradition of Dostoevsky, then it also has a more homespun attentiveness to the dailyness of life. The religious visions are interspersed with a lovingly detailed portrait of marriage and fatherhood: the bedtime routines of a contented but erotically jaded couple, the rivalries and crises of six-year-olds.

The plot hinges on an act of murder, which introduces questions of salvation and redemption

For me these domestic scenes are more successful than the purely religious ones. It’s a great challenge to make religion engaging for the non-religious reader. Graham Greene manages it by evoking his characters’ vision of damnation vividly enough that the reader can fear it alongside them. Griffiths has set himself a more difficult task, because McCullough’s religious views are more abstract and his encounters with God are more magical. At one point, we are half expected to accept a miracle. Even so, the novel does gain from the inclusion of religion. What religion has traditionally offered fiction is a raising of the stakes, and this is also the case here. The plot hinges on an act of murder, which introduces questions of salvation and redemption – of how far love can be tested. More compellingly, these questions are also raised in relation to McCullough and Holly’s relationship.

During one of his long sojourns away from home, McCullough falls in love with a woman called Judith, the mother of one of the people helping him build his church. Torn between his sense that he must seize life when it’s offered to him and his loyalty to Holly, McCullough is caught in a potentially cliched situation. What complicates it, though, is that Griffiths makes both women fully enticing: they are courageous, intelligent and sensual. And most importantly, he allows both the marriage and the affair to proffer convincing possibilities for godliness. They seem at once to offer and to bar the way to the kind of universal love that McCullough believes God wishes him to feel.

Sensitive observations on marriage and its limitations combine with the metaphysical here. It’s not because she is incapable of understanding him that Holly can’t follow McCullough’s spiritual journey as Judith can, but because marriage itself limits the range of new feelings or characteristics that can be tolerated. “While both would agree that over the years their love had deepened, it was cruel that such a deepening meant they were less playful than they used to be, less independently generous with each other.”

Thus, the reduced possibilities of marriage themselves make McCullough potentially less godly, because he is less open to the world’s emotional and erotic charge and less capable of universal love. Yet at the same time, if anything makes the world and its inhabitants matter to him, then it’s the sleeping figures of his children and the weary face of his once-joyful partner. It is because of his confidence in quiet family love that McCullough can learn to love the not always lovable strangers he encounters on his journey. There are no answers here, but it’s a testament to the generosity and ambition of Griffiths’s novel that the questions raised should seem as important as they do.

 Lara Feigel is the author of The Bitter Taste of Victory: Life, Love and Art in the Ruins of the Reich (Bloomsbury). As a God Might Be is published by Dodo Ink.

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