Modern Gods

A novel of two halves. On the one hand we follow a family in crisis. Alison has escaped her first marriage to a drunken, abusive husband and has hitched herself to a seemingly good man who turns out to have the worst sort of past for a family to accommodate in Northern Ireland of the 21st century. Two decades after the Good Friday Agreement, memories are still too raw.

‘A second marriage meant substituting old ceremonies and traditions with different ones, meant trading in the old gods for new, but Alison couldn’t help it; she didn’t believe in it any longer. She’d lost her faith and found the new gods to be false gods.’

On the other hand we journey with Alison’s sister, Liz, to Papua New Guinea to make a TV documentary about a local woman who has established a religious following in the heart of the jungle (a cargo cult, a concept new to me and utterly fascinating). This is in direct competition with a Protestant mission on the same island and here lies the link between the two halves of the novel.

Nick Laird presents a thoughtful and carefully written take on religion (of any denomination), its genesis and how it survives, mostly through the observations of our anthropologist Liz.

‘…how long can you enforce belief based on some future event occurring? How long can Belef promise and not deliver? Here Liz drew a little asterisk, then, at the bottom of the page, its twin, and wrote: Of course, Christians have been waiting for two thousand years for their own cargo! The trick is to keep them on edge - on red alert - ‘one cannot know the hour.”’

‘It seemed to Liz that Josh was living out the longings of a mystic who’d pitched up in the desert two thousand years or so ago. He’s staked his life - and his wife’s, his children’s lives, the little time he’d got on this good green earth - on something he could neither see nor hear. He had a hunch, a feeling in his gut, and on that he’d bet the farm.’

Are we to think Belef’s followers foolish and susceptible to her charisma? Are they not living hard, impoverished lives, hopeful of better and comforted by the force of her self-belief? Have they turned their backs on the Mission or are they, like Usai, torn between the two and hedging their bets?

There is no need to labour the comparisons between the versions of religion we see here, their competitiveness and their inability to exist side by side with each other. Religions are shown to be basically the same - live according to certain rules and have faith that the reward will be received sometime afterwards. Whether one will ever be able to accommodate the existence of another is a topical question, as it has been throughout history. I’d certainly recommend this book.