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On God

His mysterious ways

Norman Mailer
Continuum, 221pp, £16.99,

Roger Lewis

Wednesday, 26th March 2008

Norman Mail takes on God, and Roger Lewis reviews the result

Norman Mailer spent his life hunting for a subject big enough to suit or satisfy his titanic ego. The post- humous On God suggests he finally hit the spot. The Almighty is made to come across as an embattled novelist — as a version of Norman Mailer himself in fact — ‘a mighty source of creative energy,’ whose most developed works are human beings, though ‘think of the excitement of God when the dinosaur came into being’. Yes indeed — the mighty brontosaurus can readily be seen as Mailer’s evolutionary ancestor. Earlier in his career, however, God wasn’t quite so competent and went through a long apprentice phase marred by failures — fish ‘with hideous eyes’ and ‘worm life, frog life, vermin life’. As for insects, these must surely be the Devil’s contribution. In Mailer’s view of Creation, ‘the Devil was meddling in it from the commencement’.

God and the Devil are a pair of warring twins, locked in a permanent cosmic struggle — good versus evil is an obvious example of the antipathy. Mailer also mentions pleasure and pain and order and disorder; and it is through a combination of demonic and divine machinations that the personality is formulated. The odds go one way — you get Hitler or Gary Gilmore; on another occasion — a Gandhi or a Martin Luther King. Saints, by the way, were devised to wear the Devil out. Sadly, it is the Devil that is currently triumphant. ‘Bush is one of the Devil’s clients,’ we are told. ‘The Devil may be winning right now in America’.

Mailer has always been very bullish. I’ve long admired the hulking energy of his thought and imagination. If he had a shortcoming it is that he kept falling for the Hemingway stuff about pugilism and trapping big game. He reminded me of one of those Celtic actors embarrassed by make up and costumes and who go on the booze as compensation. The literary life being similarly not really manly, Mailer went in for silly brawls and contests, knocking himself unconscious if nobody else could be bothered to enter the ring. In On God, however, he talks with such confidence about ineffable matters that cannot ever be proved, his soulmate isn’t Richard Burton or even Oliver Reed, but former Priestess at the Court of Tutankhamen and fabled Lost City of Atlantis resident, hippy-dippy Shirley MacLaine. When Mailer says our mission is ‘to travel out across the stars, not necessarily in spaceships but by our spirits,’ I thought the copy editor had dropped a line from the actress’s seminal Sage-ing While Age-ing into the text by mistake.

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