The atheist delusion

Dan Rhodes apparently had trouble finding a publisher for this short novel, and it’s possible to envisage a certain amount of sorrowful head-shaking in legal departments at its theme. In the dead of winter, accompanied by his long-suffering ‘male secretary’ Smee, a ‘thrice-married evolutionary biologist’ named Richard Dawkins gets stranded in rural England while en route to address the All Bottoms Women’s Institute on the topic of the non-existence of God. This elderly, irascible scientist is taken in by the local vicar and his wife, and forced to contend with various local problems, from religious disputes — ‘Your silly books are just collections of fairy stories; you might as well revolve your lives around the teachings of the Three Billy Goats Gruff’ — to the switching-on of the village’s Christmas lights, an event which he chooses to preface with ‘a five-minute distillation of his views on the subject of infanticide’.