The Voice of God

Is it possible for God to be a character in fiction?

Some authors clearly think so. This is how Peter Esterhazy's The Book of Hrabal begins:

The two angels spoke to each other in the language of (what else?) angels. They had assumed the guise of young men; one of them was called Blaise, the other Gabriel, but everyone, including the Good Lord, just called him Cho-Cho.
   'Look here, Cho-Cho, you'd better go and check out what in God's name, if you'll pardon the expression, they're up to down there ... Straight to the point, minimum of fuss, but plenty of circumspection, you know how it is ... free will and tact and all that jazz. And take someone along ... You'll need him.'
   'For a witness?'
   'Are you pulling my leg, Cho-Cho, or what? You're an azes ponem, a wiseguy, eh? So stop it. And cut the crap. No need spelling it all out. What're you, a frustrated accountant? Don't you make me account for myself, you hear?'

And this is Irvine Welsh's God in The Granton Star Cause:

- Shut it cunt! Ah've fuckin hud it up tae ma eyebaws wi aw this repentance shite. Vengeance is mine, n ah intend tae take it, oan ma ain lazy n selfish nature, through the species ah created, through thir representative. That's you.

[You can read about another example of God in fiction (written by a Jewish author, Shalom Auslander) here.]

There are perhaps two questions which arise here. 1. Should God ever be a character in fiction (which I'll address in another post about Noye's Fludde)? 2. If He is a character in fiction then how should He be portrayed?

Welsh's God speaks not in the Standard English of the narrator but, more surprisingly, in Boab Coyle's vernacular. He seems, in terms of language and attitude, to be a projection of Coyle rather than a divine being. In other words, Welsh is far more interested in human weaknesses than he is in divine and he uses humour (and the full resources of the language) to depict our various weaknesses. Some critics have also suggested that The Granton Star Cause is, in part, a response to Calvinism, which suggests an intriguing link with the Catholic Muriel Spark.

Nevertheless, however much we seek to understand Welsh's and Esterhazy's work from a literary perspective, we cannot ignore theology. If we believe that God has spoken, if we believe that we should not take the name of God in vain, then we need to think very carefully indeed before including God in our fiction.

This is something Hemingway understood: "I don't like to write like God," he once wrote. Let alone include Him in his fiction. The writer sometimes has a duty to be humble.

A Far Cry from Kensington

Muriel Spark's A Far Cry from Kensington is a playful, clever and occasionally disturbing comic novel. It is also a book about the publishing industry but it's far from being a self-obsessed media novel.

The central character and narrator is Mrs Hawkins, who works for (and gets sacked by) a series of publishing houses. However, equally important to her and the plot are her fellow tenants in a large "rooming-house" in South Kensington. The most significant of these is Wanda Podolak, a Polish dressmaker and devout Catholic who begins to receive poison letters and anonymous phone calls, the investigation and consequences of which lie at the heart of the novel.

Mrs Hawkins, as she insists on being called, is a wonderful character. A Catholic, like Spark herself, she recites the Angelus at midday even while in the midst of work conversations (which makes for some wonderful comic juxtapositions). She is also a great dispenser of advice and so the novel provides, in passing, some fantastic passages about creative writing, simply because "it fell to me to give advice to many authors ... So I will repeat it here, free of charge."

This advice includes such gems as acquiring a cat, which "will invariably get up on your desk and settle placidly under the desk-lamp. ... The cat will settle down and be serene, with a serenity that passes all understanding. And the tranquillity of the cat will gradually come to affect you, sitting there at your desk, so that all the excitable qualities that impede your concentration compose themselves and give your mind back the self-command it has lost."

I have not yet taken this advice myself and so cannot comment on its usefulness.

Someone else who fails to take any of Mrs Hawkins' advice is Hector Bartlett, a "pisseur de copie", who represents all that Mrs Hawkins (and, I suspect, Spark herself) despised. He was a writer who, as he put it, took "incalculable pains with my prose style."

"He did indeed," the narrator agrees. "The pains showed. His writings writhed and ached with twists and turns and tergiversations, inept words, fanciful repetitions, far-fetched verbosity and long, Latin-based words."

The page and a half which this quotation concludes would make a wonderful A Level unseen passage.

But A Far Cry from Kensington is not simply a book to be mined for great quotes: it is a novel which fizzes with wit, intrigue and psychological insights. Muriel Spark was a great novelist and, as this and many other novels reveal, her books deserves to be much more widely studied and read.

More Thoughts on Catholicism and the Novel

As I mentioned in a previous post, Georg Lukács famously claimed that the novel was "the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God." But does this stand up to examination?

It's easy to assume that 19th Century Realist novels (and their 20th Century Modernist successors) define the genre. With their focus on the individual in this world alone, Eliot, Hardy, Woolf et al certainly seem to have written epics of a world abandoned by God.

However, it doesn't take long to find another way of looking at the novel. We have, for instance, just celebrated the 200th anniversary of Charles Dickens, an author who (according to G.K. Chesterton) was heir to a different tradition that stretched back through Shakespeare to Chaucer and other great pre-Reformation authors.

As Flannery O'Connor once wisely noted in 'Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction': "All novelists are fundamentally seekers and describers of the real, but the realism of each novelist will depend on his view of the ultimate reaches of reality."

I would argue that some of the novelists of the 19th Century did a wonderful job of describing this world but only at the cost of restricting their vision of reality.

So where are the novelists to whom Flannery O'Connor's words apply? Muriel Spark, a Catholic convert, is a good example.

According to one critic: "[It] is as parables concerning the nature of reality that her novels must be read. In them reality exists simultaneously on several different planes. Most often and most easily observed is the naturalistic level, a term used here to refer to the ordinary or commonplace world characterized by unremarkable people who lead routine lives. The naturalistic level is presented with absolute clarity and reality. Less easily understood is the author's presentation of the supernatural level, which frequently interrupts and alters the naturalistic plane."

And later she adds: "Muriel Spark … emerges as a novelist whose themes are religious, even if they are not always couched in traditionally religious terms…. [The] author is acutely aware not only of the world of man, but also of the world of God and the incongruity between the two. The world of man is represented by the naturalistic surface of her novels which realistically depicts the commonplace lives of the characters. The world of God is represented by the extraordinary and inexplicable happenings which disrupt that surface. Both are quite real. They are complementary parts of a whole and rich reality…."

It is perhaps no surprise that Muriel Spark still does not receive the acclaim she deserves. Unless writing about The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, many commentators simply don't know what to make of her. She doesn't quite fit into the tradition of the novel as popularly conceived.

But, of course, she's not alone. There have been plenty of other novelists who wrote about what Evelyn Waugh called, in his 1959 preface to Brideshead Revisited, "the operation of divine grace on a group of diverse but closely connected characters".

It's also worth pointing out that the world of the novel has changed out of all recognition since Lukács wrote The Theory of the Novel in 1920 (and even since Leavis wrote The Great Tradition in 1948) Both Magic Realism and Postmodernism in their different ways have disrupted the Realist tradition. Novelists now have to be open to wider possibilities, even the possibility of faith.

Muriel Spark - 'Symposium' and other novels

Muriel Spark is an absolute godsend for English teachers. Her novels are (really) short, (usually) funny and (always) thought-provoking.

The most well-known of her 22 novels is The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie but Spark does not deserve to be remembered as a one-book wonder. She was, in fact, one of the most innovative and quirky novelists of the 20th Century. However, perhaps more than any other novelist of her age, she suffered from her determination not to be labelled. Writing about everything from desert island castaways to convents, from Lord Lucan to finishing schools, Spark always kept her readers guessing about what was coming next.

This same variety can be seen within individual novels too. Symposium, for example, is part comedy, part tragedy, part murder-mystery and part philosophical entertainment. There are sections, such as the chapter that deals with the sometimes foulmouthed, Marxist, Anglican nuns of the convent of Mary of Good Hope, which are sheer comic genius and there are others which dwell, more disturbingly, on the nature of evil.

The plot revolves around a dinner party in a fashionable part of London - part of the joke is that the classical symposium has been reduced to this - but the reader is left guessing for much of the book about which of the various guests and servants are really important. Only gradually does it become apparent that murder is afoot and only gradually does the narrator focus on one of the guests in particular, though it remains far from certain how much responsibility even this character has for any of the deaths and disappearances that soon litter the narrative.


What John Lanchester says in his excellent introduction to The Driver's Seat could equally well apply here: "Her stories always pose a set of questions. In the course of the novel most of them are resolved ... But once we have the answer, the larger sense of mystery and strangeness in the book always remain, and we are left with a lingering sense that the question we've had answered somehow misses a larger point."

In fact, what we discover the more we read is that Spark is playing with us. Just as her characters struggle to explain the deaths, so too do we struggle to piece together the clues we have been given. As in so many of Spark's novels, the relationship between the omniscient narrator and the characters mimics the relationship between God and his creatures. There is free will but the characters often fail to realise either how free they are or in what ways their freedom is bound up in the greater freedom of the novelist herself.


In The Finishing School, for example, an aspiring author says: "my characters are so real, so very real. They have souls. If you are writing a novel from the heart you have to deal with hearts and souls. The people you create are people. You can't control people just like that. Chris is writing a novel where he controls people." 


We see something similar in The Driver's Seat where the narrator quite happily tells us what is going to happen next but also refuses to look into her characters' minds: "Who knows her thoughts? Who can tell?" she asks disarmingly at one point.


The contrast with Jean Brodie who "thinks she is Providence, thought Sandy, she thinks she is the God of Calvin, she sees the beginning and the end" could not be clearer.

What we get in Symposium then is a novel in which issues of guilt, responsibility, madness and predestination are raised, played around with, and then (apparently) discarded. Most of the murders remain unsolved and the would-be murderer is thwarted by more efficient criminals who get there before she does. All this makes Symposium sound heavy-going but nothing could be further from the truth. The pace is fast, the dialogue witty and the comedy sure-footed. This is a novel to enjoy and the good news is that there are plenty more novels where this one came from.