Inventing God by Nicholas Mosley


Inventing God
Title : Inventing God
Author :
Rating :
ISBN : 0099445034
ISBN-10 : 9780099445036
Language : English
Format Type : Paperback
Number of Pages : 304
Publication : First published January 1, 2003

Hafiz is a twenty-five year old Muslim doing post-graduate work in genetics at the University of Beirut. He is one of a team working on the possibility of fashioning a biological weapon that would be effective against some ethnic groups and not others. This project seems to him impossible, but still highly dangerous. Lisa is a sixteen year old Israeli girl who feels threatened by the Jewish insistence on dwelling on memories of the Holocaust. She looks for a way out to a future. Maurice Rotblatt is a middle-aged ex-television-guru who comes to the Middle East and calls for a plague on all ethnic and religious belligerents. He then disappears. His friends in England wonder - is he a victim? A trickster? Or has he left hints about some hope for a future?-The story ends in September 2001. It is by the ability to look at the interweaving actions and aspirations of many different characters - in Lebanon, Israel, Turkey, England - that there might be a chance, it is suggested, for humans to be nudged out of their self-destructive genetic and environmental conditioning. Inventing God is a fascinating and highly topical new novel from a previous winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year award.

Inventing God Reviews

  • Marc Nash

    This book starts off really well, considering the question of whether there is a god, or whether it's necessary for human beings to invent Him. Both to stop us destroying ourselves and yet to set us at each other's throats claiming Him as our own. But then the book just doubles and trebles back on itself, never developing its themes beyond glib philosophical syllogism; if god doesn't exist, we had to invent him, but because he knew this, therefore it's proof he does exist. A series of characters based in the religious-ethnic war-torn Middle East wander in and out of improbable meetings with each other and a series of dialogues mainly consisting of non-sequiturs between them, musing on things like war, peace, love and relationship to not much effect. It's interesting that the author seemed at pains to ensure each chapter had a beautiful or imaginative simile or metaphor within its early paragraphs, before veering off into his ridiculous and frankly specious dialogue.

    The author appealed to me as a writer of ideas. There definitely in there, but I'm not sure I'll be trying another one of his books to do battle with him again.

  • Erica

    I don't remember how exactly I made my way to this book -- probably a review, or a mention in something else I read. Eh. I was less than enthralled.

  • Rob Walter

    Beautifully written characters, who lead meandering lives and struggle to make sense of the world around them.