Not cowardly enough

Nobody who reads Nigel Farndale’s The Blasphemer is likely to complain about being short-changed.

Nobody who reads Nigel Farndale’s The Blasphemer is likely to complain about being short-changed. It tackles five generations of the same family, three wars, Mahler’s ninth symphony and contemporary Islamic terrorism. Along the way, it ponders the nature of male courage, the theological implications of Darwinism and, rather more surprisingly, the existence of angels.

As a journalist himself, Farndale also seems to have noted the career path of Sebastian Faulks — that great exemplar for all British journos dreaming of literary glory. Like Birdsong, The Blasphemer depicts a soldier’s affair with an older French woman who dies in the post-war flu epidemic, but not before having a child whose identity gradually becomes clear to his descendents.

The main character, though, is Daniel Kennedy, a present-day academic zoologist and true Dawkins non-believer. When the novel begins, Daniel is heading to the Galapagos Islands with his long-time partner Nancy where he plans to propose at last. But when their sea-plane crashes, Daniel shoves her out of the way to escape from the half-submerged wreckage. From then on, he’s tormented by a conviction of his own cowardice — which, as the son, grandson and great-grandson of war heroes, he feels more keenly than most.

Worse still for an atheist, he fears he was saved from death by an angelic vision. This problem he discusses at some length with a neatly-choreographed range of friends and colleagues — from a Muslim teacher to a string theorist, a gay doctor to a Catholic musician who, somewhat joltingly, turns out to be one of the most luridly villainous hypocrites outside a Dickens novel. Meanwhile, in Ypres in 1917, we discover that Daniel’s great-grandfather wasn’t all he seemed either…

The novel, in fact, is at its best once these many plates have been set spinning, and the story-telling takes on a genuine sweep.