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A Novel Approach to Religion

Paul Mitchell May 18

As several essays in the March issue of Meanjin have shown, religion is still very much a contested part of our life, politics and behaviour. Yet how does the presence (or absence) of God impact on our literature? From Tim Winton’s Breath to Christos Tsiolkas’s Dead Europe and Geraldine Brooks’s People of the Book, Paul Mitchell examines how belief treads, with both a heavy and delicate step, in our novels, and what writers have to offer in terms of fear, mystery, blood and hope. A brief extract is below, and you can read the full version on our editions page.



The world changed on 11 September 2001, but did the Australian novel? After 9/11, fundamentalism provoked a significant reaction in the West. The often marginalised topic of religion—particularly as it pertained to Islamic beliefs—was suddenly on the front pew. Moderate Muslim voices were sought, fundamentalist religion was analysed (including the Bush administration’s connections to fundamentalist Christianity and end-time prophecies), and God, long presumed dead (or at least sleeping soundly) became a factor in global conflict.

God, or at least those who believed in a particular version of him, had gone too far. In the West, nonfiction scribes were the loudest and most publicised crusaders. ‘New atheists’ such as Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, unwilling to enter a dialogue with religious moderates, impressed upon us the need to stamp out God altogether. As expected, theist authors Karen Armstrong, Charles Taylor, Francis S. Collins and others weighed in with counter-theses. For the past eight years, the war on terror has run parallel with a Western war of words about God’s place in global culture.

But what part have novelists taken in this war? Airports post-9/11 were well stocked with Dan Brown’s take on religion, notably The Da Vinci Code, a novel that questioned the divinity of Christ. At a time when Dawkins and others were calling for the Godhead’s head, The Da Vinci Code saw that readers of popular fiction didn’t escape, to quote the title of a Karen Armstrong tome, the ‘battle for God’.

I’m not sure if there have been more Western literary novels with religion as a central theme published in the last eight years than in the previous eight, but a number come to mind. Among them British author A.N. Wilson’s My Name is Legion, published in 2004. A believer-cum-atheist-cum-believer, in this book Wilson both satirised Fleet Street and addressed the role of faith and churches in developing a civil society. Pulitzer Prize winner Marilynne Robinson published Gilead and Home, novels that dealt with Congregationalist pastor John Ames’ theological struggles. The late Norman Mailer’s last novel, The Castle in the Forest, looked at a potential demonic influence on Adolf Hitler, and the dramatic tension in Zadie Smith’s 2007 work On Beauty was largely achieved via a conflict between atheists and conservative Christians. Finally, the late John Updike’s 2006 novel Terrorist explored the religious underpinnings of an American-born Muslim’s terrorist activities.

Rather than focusing on fundamentalism more generally, Australian novelists have dealt mainly with the specifics of terrorism: Richard Flanagan gave us The Unknown Terrorist, Andrew McGahan published Underground, Australian-born Canadian Janet Turner Hospital wrote Due Preparations for the Plague.[1] It is harder to find novels by Australians published in the past eight years that feature religion more generally. In the young adult novel The Gospel According to Luke by Emily Maguire (2006), the drama unfolds as a result of the conflict between a Christian fundamentalist pastor and an atheist abortion clinic worker. In a number of other literary novels, however, religion is present, but reviewers have not much commented on it: Tim Winton’s Breath, Christos Tsiolkas’s Dead Europe, Janette Turner Hospital’s Orpheus Lost, Geraldine Brooks’s People of the Book, Ali Alizedah’s The New Angel, Sophie Cunningham’s Bird and Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria all come to mind. It could be argued that any novels which address Aboriginal culture have religion as a theme: as David Tacey pointed out in Edge of the Sacred (1995), in ‘Aboriginal cosmology landscape is a living field of spirits and metaphysical forces’ and humans are seen as intimately linked with this sacralised landscape. Certainly Carpentaria presents mythology and views of the sacred as a point of connection for indigenous political and ecological concerns.[2]



Notes

1. A recent review of Ken Gelder and Paul Salzman’s After the Celebration: Australian Fiction 1989–2007 suggested we might have a new literary mode on our shelves: the ‘terrorist novel’. Jean-Francois Vernay, review at https://www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/jasal/article/viewFile/9.R5/1656 accessed 5 October 2009. Back to article

2. Francis Devlin-Glass, Antipodes, June 2007, review at http://www.australianliterature.org/Carpentaria%20review.pdf accessed 6 October 2009. Back to article


 

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