Nobody who reads Nigel Farndale’s The Blasphemer is likely to complain about being short-changed.
Nobody who reads Nigel Farndale’s The Blasphemer is likely to complain about being short-changed. It tackles five generations of the same family, three wars, Mahler’s ninth symphony and contemporary Islamic terrorism. Along the way, it ponders the nature of male courage, the theological implications of Darwinism and, rather more surprisingly, the existence of angels.
As a journalist himself, Farndale also seems to have noted the career path of Sebastian Faulks — that great exemplar for all British journos dreaming of literary glory. Like Birdsong, The Blasphemer depicts a soldier’s affair with an older French woman who dies in the post-war flu epidemic, but not before having a child whose identity gradually becomes clear to his descendents.
The main character, though, is Daniel Kennedy, a present-day academic zoologist and true Dawkins non-believer.
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