The cameraman is persuaded to climb through the narrow aperture and illuminate their search in the cramped tunnels beyond. Dust streams towards the light as they make their hysteroscopic journey, through the buried past and on to an uncertain future.
Inventing God is full of ‘holes’. Characters disappear into and generally re-emerge from craters, excavations, cellars, tunnels, shafts and passages. Re-birth and birth itself are the new bearers of religious meaning, they are the new "old stories". There has been more than enough death, and the spoof 'immortality' of the missing and mythic 'media don', Maurice Rotblatt, is the absence at the heart of the novel. A cast of slightly spectral characters find their lives intermingle as they undertake sometimes dangerous journeys of subversion and self-discovery. The post-modern crises of Christianity, Judaism and Islam are teased out as the narrative flits from Beirut to London, Jerusalem to Oxfordshire, Paris to Kurdistan.
Running through the novel is a chain of ‘angelic’ interventions. Characters are rescued by the disinterested and coincidental actions of others: a saved character in one scene becomes a saviour in another. This loose linkage of serial empowerments may be Mosley's global message, but, on the whole, he resists any notion of a meta-narrative and is content with the interweaving and testing of smaller stories. Is this the new religious task?
Many of the big stories of our time are visited too: fundamentalism and war; oil-fuelled globalization and environmental degradation; genetic experimentation and ethnic cleansing; international satellite surveillance and weapons inspection. The reader has good reason to suspect that the CIA, MI6, Mossad and Hezbollah may have infiltrated this circle of relationships. Several of the academics are compromised in this way, including Hafiz Ahmed a young Muslim geneticist at the American University of Beirut. He is one of a secretly funded team working on the possibility of producing a biological weapon that will be effective against some ethnic and religious groups, but not others. The project seems impossible to him and in the dangerous game of bluff and counterbluff between the West and the Arab World, he declares a Sufi-inspired Holy War against "tendencies to hatred and violence in oneself". On his way to sabotage the bomb trials, he rescues Lisa, a teenage runaway from Jerusalem, who feels threatened by the Jewish insistence on dwelling on memories of the Holocaust. She rejects her Jewish identity and longs for Jews to "take responsibility for themselves and their enemies". Lisa's greatuncle Nathan, a Professor of Religion out of favour with the Zionists, has several of the best lines in the book, including: "People have seldom been frightened of war: what they can't bear is emptiness.” The story ends on September 11th, 2001. Twenty months later, we have been reminded that ‘conventional’ western weaponry, ordered up by committed Christian leaders with a mission to rid the world of terror, can still approximate the intention of Hafiz's impossible bomb.
Nicholas Mosley once resigned from a Booker Prize jury, lamenting that there was no longer any room for novels of ideas. Inventing God makes up for some deficiencies in dialogue and character development by being positively and playfully overflowing with ideas. For me, E. L. Doctorow's City of God (see David Boulton's review in SoF46) remains the top ‘Sea of Faith Novel’ of recent times, but Inventing God is a very creditable runner-up.
Andy Kemp is regular contributor to Sof. He is a Methodist local preacher, a freelance writer and a member of the Northwest Group.