Reginald Askew (1928–2012)

I didn't find this an easy book. It is a sort of retelling of the tale of Noah as a 20th-century theological reflection, or group of theological reflections, threaded together and clothed in the garb of a novel in a contemporary setting.

In the first chapter, we find ourselves among Noah's extended family immediately after his funeral, arguing over their relationships to a difficult and unconventional patriarch, and (in very philosophical terms) the question of whether Noah was selfish in building the Ark.

For the rest of the book, we are transported earlier in the 20th century (but still not very far back), to discover that the drunken patriarch was in fact an Anglican vicar, building his dark wooden parish Ark/Church without the proper permission of the diocese, and exchanging a patchwork of everyday comments and opaque theological discourses with his mostly more-or-less adult children. Little encyclopedic discursions abound: on dogwoods, on horses, on the 17th and 18th century writings about the Flood - not to mention the odd poem and a recipe for fish stew. There is so little reference to the world outside the family (some church officials and parishioners, and an archetypal outsider, the travelling showman called Mr Cane/Cain with his circus lion) that we seem to be in a bubble - a miniature ecclesiastical and domestic Gormenghast - even before the rest of the world vanishes beneath the Flood, which arrives without fuss in the wind and the rain on the night of 27th December. Mr Cane announces the release of the animals, and disappears; they have somehow arrived in the nave of the church, while the family camps in the tower, and we turn to the strong smell of animals and the unfathomable absence of God.

The dislocation between the vicar with his vocation and the drunken patriarch of the first chapter is, I suppose, at least true to the similar mismatch in the biblical account. The dislocation between the representation of events and the almost entirely metaphorical intent of the writing is harder to navigate. The sense of apocalypse is almost entirely confined to the spiritual struggles of the Rev. Noah. This is, perhaps, the closest thing I have encountered to a Christian surrealist novel.

MB 10-xi-2015… (més)