Modern Gods

Nick Laird

4th Estate, £12.99

Review by Nick Major

A FEW pages in to Nick Laird’s third novel, Kenneth Donnelly becomes irritated by his wife’s absent mindedness. “What’s got into you?” he says, after she tries to remove his plate from the table before he’s finished eating. For Judith, the question holds a deeper meaning. She has a tumour in her stomach. "I don’t know, she wanted to scream. I don’t know what’s got into me or how it got there or how to get it out." In a broader sense, the question is central to Modern Gods. Every character in this bruising novel is affected – you could say infected – by the violence of religion; some people shed blood for their belief, some defend the violence of others; some can’t figure out what to believe. By the end of the book, the reader might well ask: what has got into everyone?

It is Kenneth and Judith’s two daughters, Liz and Alison, who are the protagonists, but they are observers more than participants. Observing is Liz’s job. She is a beleaguered academic working in New York. An anthropologist, she has spent her life looking at cultures and tribes and published one book on Claude Levi Strauss. As she sets off for her home town of Ballyglass in Ulster where Alison is getting married she accepts an invitation to present a BBC documentary on a new cargo cult in New Ulster, an island off the coast of Papua New Guinea.

Liz’s PhD was written on kinship groups in Ulster and the trip home is a reminder of the dark fissures that run through the political landscape. Like Ireland’s recent history, the novel is foregrounded in violence. In the prologue, two men in Halloween costumes enter a bar in Northern Ireland and start shooting. We know this horror will have some import on the present but are kept in the dark for a while. Alison’s fiancee Stephen, whose past is a blank slate, seems likely to have been involved in this atrocity. When he picks Liz up from the airport she accidentally discovers his real name and starts to have reservations about his intentions towards her sister. Meanwhile, Alison is recovering after Stephen’s attack on her in his sleep.

As Liz departs from Ireland for the other side of the world, Stephen’s brutal past is revealed in the media. He was a member of the Ulster Freedom Fighters during The Troubles. He committed a horrific crime but was let out of prison early as part of the Good Friday Agreement. The Ulster and New Ulster narrative fork and the Donnelly family’s lack of suspicion towards Stephen is all a little too neat. It is clear from early on that Laird excels at writing rich versatile sentences and struggles with plot, although he succeeds in embellishing his central theme with colour and nuance. All writers have their weaknesses and strengths. Laird has the right sort of strengths. That he has written three collections of verse has probably helped him develop a textured style attentive to the minutiae of language.

It is Laird’s prose more than the narrative action which creates the greatest sense of disquiet. Even something celebratory, in Laird’s world, is painted in grotesquery and dark humour. This is his description of Alison and Kenneth, arm-in-arm, walking towards the altar: "she advanced like a large pale pupa being dragged by another insect, this one dark and a little stiff-legged in his morning suit, the tails of which hung behind like folded wings." After marrying in ignorance, Alison spends her honeymoon with a man she no longer recognises, and, worse, must try to love a man the whole world seems to hate.

In the South Pacific, Liz is watching people fall in love with Belef, the female leader of a new cult born of the marriage of Christianity, technology and personal grief. She gets sucked into the bizarre aura of Belef, who spins tales of creation and new beginnings. This part of the novel is too long, and Laird’s style loses its lustre. But it is a shrewd portrayal of the spell religion casts over malleable, uncritical minds. Belef’s creation myths are a microcosm of the macrocosmic story of forgiveness and redemption at the heart of Modern Gods. We are used to novels bringing the past to bear on the present. This clever and thoughtful variation uses the formula to explore how religion – Christianity in particular – leaves its bloody marks not only on the body but in the deepest recesses of the mind.