God's Funeral

The book seems to fall between 2 stools, being a bit too jokey to satisfy the academics, and yet - at least in part - being too demanding (if not totally impenetrable) for the lay reader.

Also it is not written to a consistent intellectual standard. For example in the chapter on Science we find the following readily accessible - and perhaps even facile - comment: "In all likelihood, our post-modern habit of viewing science as only a paradigm would evaporate if we developed appendicitis. We should look for a medically trained surgeon who knows what an appendix was, where it was, and how to cut it out without killing us. Likewise, we should be happy to debate the essentially fictive nature of, let us say, Newton's Laws of Gravity unless and until someone threatened to throw us out of a top-storey window. Then the law of gravity would seem very real indeed."

Whereas in a later chapter on William James, we have the more cerebral: "The Idealist, however, seems to have, ready-made, a conception of knowledge which is in itself quite "religious". This is especially true if you follow Hegel in thinking that the universe itself, in so far as it has reality, is a spiritual reality. Human consciousness, itself a spiritual thing, responds to the spirit and truth of the universe. According to the Absolute Idealism of Fichte or Hegel, reality is a whole - that is, the Absolute. The great attraction of this seemingly mystical notion is that it jumps over the central stumbling block of the empiricist position - namely, how there can be forms of understanding or perceptions of truth which transcend any verification-principle which we could devise"

This may well be the sort of elementary stuff covered in Philosophy 101, but to me it just doesn't really mean anything.

On a more mundane level, there is also an irritating lack of consistency in the author's assumptions regarding the general educational background of his readership. For example, the book is peppered with French, Latin and German quotations and terminologies, some of which are translated, and others - quite arbitrarily, it would seem - are not.

Regardless of who the book was written for, it's pretty clear that the author had a whale of a time writing it. Despite pompously stating that "it is not for one generation to pass judgement on its ancestors..." (p 146), this is of course precisely what he proceeds to do...and with some relish, sticking the boot in left, right and centre. Few of the characters described in the potted biographies that form the core of the book escape without having some aspect of their personas vilified. All good stuff though.

Despite the above criticisms, this book tells a fascinating story, and anyone with enough interest in the subject to be reading this review would be able to extract enough from it to make it a worthwhile read. You might, however, need access to a good dictionary, as there are a lot of obscure "ologies" referred to, and no glossary!

This device, and the further quoting of it many times in the text, is a successful focus for a well-guided intellectual tour.

The bookish reader is driven to return to Hardy and Spencer, and also to make new 'friends' (in the author's cheerful conceit) of both Wilson himself and unknowns like George Tyrrell of the 'Modernist Catholic' persuasion.

The non-bookish reader will not, I should think, get past the first chapter, or indeed past the cover and the well-chosen photographs; this is a dense book, and enjoyable to read, but it is for the thoughful and leisured reader who is prepared to commit time and attention.