Mail on Sunday, 22 June 2008, headlined “I create gods all the time—now I think one might exist”
I like the small gods. Like Anoia. And I think the Universe has meaning. It has a purpose. It might not be our purpose, but we’re part of it.
The vicar when I lived in Penn was a Reverend Muspratt. He was quite posh for a clergyman—I think old ladies gave him a lot of money and a lot of tea. He came in one day through the scullery.*1 My father had brought back from Burma a bust of the Buddha and my mother really liked it. Reverend Muspratt pointed at it and said “That is a pagan icon.”
Even I, at that time, knew enough to know that anyone talking to my mum like that was in trouble. She threw him out onto the step.
I’m a kind of atheist—because, well, you never know.…
There is a rumour going around that I have found God. I think this is unlikely because I have enough difficulty finding my keys, and there is empirical evidence that they exist.
But it is true that in an interview I gave recently I did describe a sudden, distinct feeling I had one hectic day that everything I was doing was right and things were happening as they should. It seemed like the memory of a voice and it came wrapped in its own brief little bubble of tranquillity. I’m not used to this.
As a fantasy writer I create fresh gods and philosophies almost with every new book (I’m rather pleased with Anoia, the goddess of Things That Get Stuck in Drawers, whose temple is hung about with the bent remains of egg whisks and spatulas. She actually appears to work in this world, too). But since contracting Alzheimer’s disease I have spent my long winter walks trying to work out what it is, if anything, that I really believe.
I read the Old Testament all the way through when I was about thirteen and was horrified. A few months afterwards I read the Origin of Species, hallucinating very mildly because I was in bed with flu at the time. Despite that or because of that, it all made perfect sense. As soon as I was allowed out again I went and borrowed the sequel and even then it struck me that Darwin had missed a trick with the title. If only a good publicist had pointed out to him that the Ascent of Man had more reader appeal, perhaps there wouldn’t have been quite as much fuss.
Evolution was far more thrilling to me than the biblical account. Who would not rather be a rising ape than a falling angel? To my juvenile eyes Darwin was proved true every day. It doesn’t take much to make us flip back into monkeys again.
The New Testament, now, I quite liked. Jesus had a lot of good things to say and as for his father, he must have been highly thought of by the community to work on wood—a material that couldn’t have been widely available in Palestine.
But I could never see the two testaments as one coherent narrative. Besides, by then I was reading mythology for fun, and had run into Sir George Frazer’s Folklore in the Old Testament, a velvet-gloved hatchet job if ever there was one. By the time I was fourteen I was too smart for my own god.
I could never find the answers, you see. Perhaps I asked the wrong kind of question, or was the wrong kind of kid, even back in primary school.
I was puzzled by the fact that, according to the hymn, there was a green hill far away “without a city wall.” What was so unusual about a hill not having a wall? If only someone had explained … And that is how it went—there was never the explanation.
I asked a teacher what the opposite of a miracle was and she, without thinking, I assume, said it was an act of god. You shouldn’t say something like that to the kind of kid who will grow up to be a writer; we have long memories. But I’d asked the question because my mother had told me about two families she knew in the East End of London. They lived in a pair of semidetached houses. The daughter of one was due to get married to the son of the other and on the night before the wedding a German bomb destroyed all the members of both families who were staying in those houses in one go, except for the sailor brother of the groom who arrived in time to help scrabble through the wreckage with his bare hands. Like many of the stories she told me, this had an enormous effect on me. I thought it was a miracle. It was exactly the same shape as a miracle. It was just … reversed.
Did the sailor thank his god that the bomb had missed him? Or did he curse because it had not missed his family? If the sailor had given thanks, wouldn’t he be betraying his family? If God saved one, he could have saved the rest, couldn’t he? After all, isn’t God in charge? Why does he act as if he isn’t? Does he want us to act as if he isn’t, too? (As a kid I had a very clear image of the Almighty: he had a tail coat and pinstriped trousers, black, slicked-down hair, and an aquiline nose. On the whole, I was probably a rather strange child, and I wonder what my life might have been like if I’d met a decent theologian when I was nine.)
About five years ago that child rose up in me again, and I began work on a book, soon to see the light of day as Nation. It came to me overnight, in all but the fine detail.
It is set on a world very like this one, at the time of an explosion very like that of Krakatoa, and in the centre of my book, a thirteen-year-old boy, now orphaned, screams at his gods for answers when he hasn’t fully understood what the questions are. He hates them too much not to believe. He has had to bury his own family; he is not going to give thanks to anyone. And I watched him try to build a new nation and a new philosophy. “The creator gave us the brains to prove he doesn’t exist,” he says as an old man. “It is better to build a seismograph than to worship the volcano.”
I agree. I don’t believe. I never have, not in big beards in the sky. But I was brought up traditionally Church of England, which is to say that while churchgoing did not figure in my family’s plans for the Sabbath, practically all the Ten Commandments were obeyed by instinct and a general air of reason, kindness, and decency prevailed. Belief was never mentioned at home, but right actions were taught by daily example.
Possibly because of this, I’ve never disliked religion. I think it has some purpose in our evolution. I don’t have much truck with the “religion is the cause of most of our wars” school of thought, because in fact that’s manifestly done by mad, manipulative, and power-hungry men who cloak their ambition in God.
I number believers of all sorts among my friends. Some of them are praying for me. I’m happy that they wish to do this, I really am, but I think science may be a better bet.
So what shall I make of the voice that spoke to me recently as I was scuttling around getting ready for yet another spell on a chat show sofa? More accurately it was the memory of a voice in my head, and it told me that everything was okay and things were happening as they should. For a moment, the world had felt at peace. Where did it come from?
Me, actually—the part of all of us that, in my case, caused me to stand in awe the first time I heard Thomas Tallis’s Spem in alium, and the elation I felt on a walk one day last February, when the light of the setting sun turned a ploughed field into shocking pink; I believe it’s what Abraham felt on the mountain and Einstein did when it turned out that E=mc2.
It’s that moment, that brief epiphany when the universe opens up and shows us something, and in that instant we get just a sense of an order greater than heaven and, as yet at least, beyond the grasp of Hawking. It doesn’t require worship, but, I think, rewards intelligence, observation, and inquiring minds. I don’t think I’ve found God but I may have seen where gods come from.
*1 We had sculleries in those days. I like them.