There have been plenty of books in recent years in which apparently sane hacks go off in search of loonies to poke fun at. While The Heretics looks at first as if it fits neatly into the genre, there turns out to be rather more to it than that. Not that the book doesn’t come richly stocked with people who hold what my mother used to call very unreliable opinions.
They include a regressive hypnotherapist called Vered who once treated someone who believed they’d been a twig in a previous life, and an NHS-funded expert on satanic rituals who insists that satanists regularly stitch babies inside the bellies of dying animals so that they can be ‘reborn’ to Satan. Apparently the satanists — when peckish — also snack on foetuses. ‘Raw or cooked?’ Storr asks her. ‘The foetuses are raw’, she tells him solemnly.
But however keen the provocation, Storr goes easy on the scorn. Instead, he wants to look at belief, and especially at the wobbly, often irrational foundations it’s built on. In many ways heis ideally qualified to do this as he’s built on very wobbly foundations himself. He’s spent years in therapy, is prone to obsessive behaviour, drinks too much and has toyed with committing suicide.
Perhaps it’s not that surprising then that he instinctively leans towards heretics — indeed towards anyone with wires coming out of their heads. Is there not something noble about their defiance of the ordinary?, he wonders. This nobility, though, often turns out to be harder to warm to in the flesh. While he hits it off immediately with John Mackay, the ‘Creationist superstar’, who he meets in a town called Devil in Australia, the two of them subsequently have a big falling-out over whether lesbian nuns go straight to hell — Mackay says yes, Storr has his doubts.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in