Diety Decapitated by Janjaweed
Admittedly, when I first picked up this book, the lines from the Joan Osborne song “One of Us," a song that I have since been able to banish back to the portion of my cerebral cortex still obsessed with 1995. In God Is Dead, the title character takes the form of a Dinka woman in Darfur who, after meeting with Colin Powell (portrayed as a Samuel L. Jackson facsimile who routinely tells his honky staff to get lost), gets killed by the Janjaweed. Dogs then eat her corpse and start speaking in Hebrew and Greek, proving to the world that God is, in fact, dead.
What happens next has absolutely nothing to do with theology, and thankfully so – this is not a fictional rendition of Christopher Hitchen’s latest book; rather, it is a collection of short stories that focus on the aftermath of a world that keeps going after God’s death (after giving a rather pat excuse as to why the world can continue to go after God’s death; then again, this is a fun book, not a serious one). The immediate offshoot is unsurprising – the clergy the world over starts to commit suicide in record numbers. However, as the book rolls on, we start to learn about the CAPA (a governing body which goes out of its way to assure people that their children are in no way special) and get to listen in on an interview with one of the dogs that ate God.
This is definitely a fun book, and a quick read, too – I finished it in a day of subway rides (no, not a whole day on the subways). Currie’s prose is quick and energetic, and his observations of daily life (which start to resemble our own before crashing into something altogether different at the end) are spot-on. The only thing holding this back from being an amazing satire – rather than the very good one that it is – is the lack of a coherent story line. The encapsulated chapters make it easy to read in short bursts, but it’s impossible to empathize with any of the characters as easily as one can when reading, say, a Vonnegut book. Still, it was fun to read, and a heck of a lot better than some songs from 1995.
