A choice of first novels | 8 December 2007

Rarely has Nietzsche been taken so literally as in Ron Currie’s God Is Dead (Picador, £12.99), wherein the deity adopts the form of a Sudanese refugee woman called Sora, and is blown to physical and metaphysical bits by a Janjaweed bomb. Just before He dies, He wishes for someone he could pray to.

That’s chapter one. Thereafter, everything goes to pot. In lieu of any religious ideology to fight over, war breaks out between the adherents of evolutionary psychology and postmodern anthropology. Africans worship the omniscient dogs that picked at Sora’s corpse; Americans adore toddlers, ‘tangible, blameless, and as cute as all hell’; the government struggles to keep people from spending their grocery money on multiple sets of Hungry Hippos. And yet, as the book’s flyleaf is at pains to make clear: even without God, life goes on.

Satires are almost always founded on such ponderous, blurbable mottos. Fortunately, Currie has built a world that’s rich enough to raise God Is Dead above its predictable punchlines.