The Blasphemer

Starred review from June 28, 2010
In British author Farndale's elegant meditation on morality (among many other topics), Daniel Kennedy, a biologist specializing in worms, is convinced that the universe is godless—until the plane carrying him and his partner, Nancy, to the Galapagos Islands crashes in the ocean. In his desperate scramble to escape the sinking plane, he pushes Nancy out of the way, though he later returns to rescue her. While the primary plot concerns Daniel and Nancy's efforts to come to terms with their near-death experience, as well as Daniel's betrayal, which Nancy can neither forget nor forgive, this ambitious novel interweaves several other narratives, one involving Daniel's grandfather in WWI (the author brilliantly evokes trench warfare), and another focused on what may be an original manuscript of part of Mahler's "unfinished" symphony. A third subplot focuses on the couple's nine-year-old daughter and her music teacher, a Muslim, in London. Farndale (A Sympathetic Hanging) can be didactic, but he knows how to tell a terrific story.

July 1, 2010

From English author Farndale, a novel about angels, a nematologist and World War I.

Daniel Kennedy is a militant atheist of the Richard Dawkins variety, a coolly rational scientist who plans to visit the Galápagos Islands at least in part to pay homage to his hero, Darwin. He travels with Nancy, the mother of his child (though, as she frequently reminds him, not his wife), but just short of their destination the plane crashes. Daniel volunteers to swim the few remaining miles to the Galápagos to get help, and on this challenging swim he experiences a cryptic epiphany—he's convinced he sees a man leading him onward and encouraging him to finish the journey. Hailed as a hero, Daniel returns to England, but he and Nancy find it difficult to rekindle their relationship, at least in part because immediately after the crash Daniel's first impulse had been to ignore Nancy and save himself. Moreover, Daniel wants to convince himself that the vision he had was a hallucination, an irrational emanation from his brain, rather than a real visitation. Daniel is also puzzled why his nine-year-old daughter is falling in love with her teacher, Hamdi, and why this teacher looked so familiar to him when he first met him. Alternating scenes with this activity in England and the Galápagos, Farndale takes us to the trenches of WWI, specifically the battle of Passchendaele, where we meet Andrew Kennedy, Daniel's great-grandfather, who experiences a similar epiphany. On that hellish first day of battle he becomes separated from his platoon, and a man (a hallucination? an angel?) leads him for hours to a safe haven, a small village in northern France, where he settles down with a war widow. Meanwhile, he'd been declared missing in action, and when authorities find him, they accuse him of desertion. Complicating the Kennedy family issues is Daniel's grandfather, "Silky" Kennedy, a WWII hero.

Farndale (Haw-Haw: The Tragedy of William and Margaret Joyce, 2005, etc.) raises compelling philosophical and theological themes, though ultimately, in literature and in life, they remain intriguingly unresolved.

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