Memoirs of God

Joan McGrath is a Toronto Board of Education library consultant.

Leibovitz is not a believer in God, but his “memoirs” of the Deity are intended as “an ‘ode’ to Him, not as a blasphemy.” The supposed author of the papers is a patient in a mental institution who believes himself to be God. In the terms of the novel, he may indeed truly be God — a Jehovah tried before a Conclave of all Gods and sentenced by them to become a mere human, bereft for a time of the power of “thought as Verb” in order that he may discover for himself, in his own vulnerable flesh, the unfairness of the Law He has set forth in the Bible.

From this premise the author explores some of the thorniest issues over which theologians have puzzled and argued: the misogyny, the cruelty, the unfairness, the contradictions to be found in the Bible. At the novel’s end, the putative God, accompanied by a fellow patient who has murdered two children in order to keep them pure of sin and to win for them eternal life, vanishes mysteriously through the solid walls of the prison, presumably to return to Heaven. This is a book that teases and provokes, and that raises very serious questions about some of mankind’s most cherished beliefs.