Customer Reviews

Towing Jehovah

5 star:		(27)
4 star:		(17)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

It's very odd. No, not this book, I'm speaking of the reviews I'm reading about it here.

I must say that I find very little humor in Towing Jehovah--or at least not the guffaw kind of humor. Read Stephen Fry for that. No, James Morrow has woven a thoughtful and provocative tale around a most improbable premise (the physical demise of God Almighty). And yet I also find little sacrilege in this, unless perhaps you are endeared with the notion that the Catholic Church is not very much like any other human institution, seeking to perpetuate its own dogma and ideology. Also, I must confess to finding little real satire here, too. Yes, there are the inevitable, and quite brilliantly done, jabs at the foibles of modern man and the society we have built--and especially at the diet we choose to eat--but these jabs are not delivered so as to ridicule or demean. There is no sense that Morrow wants us to join him in holding ourselves aloof from the rest of humanity in snobbish repose and declare solemnly "We are so much better than all that." Read Douglas Adams for that. What I did find was an intellectual, though never daunting work that displays a profound understanding of--and sympathy for--Man at the turn of this century. We may smirk at the idea that the best chef in the Merchant Marines is classified as such not because he prepares gourmet meals, but because he is capable of producing exact replicas of the world's leading fast food (no matter what the meat source). But doesn't that say an awful lot about us and our society? In Morrow's gifted hands it does. Morrow's intent seems less to ridicule Man and his institutions than it does to express faith in our inherent moral fiber. It's less a blaspheme against God of the Old Testament than it is a praise of Emmanuel Kant. In killing off God, and in writing the Jesuit physicist's final deduction of why God has died, Morrow is suggesting a humanist future for Mankind, a future in which we have passed by the need for a governing deity, grown to maturity and cast away the bonds that tie us to our Heavenly Father. Or rather, God has cast aside the bonds for us. If you love someone, let them go. This is not sacrilege, but a kind of theocratic Darwinism. Oh, there now, I went and said that awful name didn't I. Okay, maybe it IS sacrilege. Towing Jehovah: an intelligent and well written tale that DOES make sense no matter what else you read here about it.

P.S. Contrary to at least one opinion, I found most of the characters very 3 dimensional. Any author who can take a character like Anthony Van Horne (gruff old sea dog with a penchant for wearing mirrored sunglasses, a down parka and John Deere hat, and who keeps his ships log in a Popeye the Sailor notebook) and make them not only interesting, but believable and compelling deserves respect and admiration. Morrow did, and does.

Sea captain Anthony Van Horne, who blames himself for an ExxonValdez-style oil spill years ago, is suddenly visited by an angel whobears the most profound - and disturbing - tidings of all time. GodHimself is dead, and His two-mile-long corpse has fallen into theAtlantic Ocean! The Host of Heaven are dying of grief, the angelexplains, and as their last act of worship they've prepared a tomb forJehovah in a huge iceberg in the Arctic. Van Horne can achieve somevindication by towing the late Creator's body to His frozencrypt.

At the helm of the supertanker Carpco Valparaiso (the shipinvolved in the earlier maritime disaster), and flying the flag of theVatican, Van Horne leads a ragtag crew on a secret mission to find Hiscorpse and steer Him to His final resting place. Along the way, theyrescue a militant feminist-atheist who, when she discovers the natureof their mission, secretly decides that she must find a way to preventthis "proof" from becoming known to the world atlarge.

Morrow's Towing Jehovah is an absolutely brilliant and oftenqueasily unsettling satire that explores many of the great issues ofreligion, faith, and skepticism. Using the tanker's crew as amicrocosm of society, Morrow takes jabs at Catholics, Jews, skeptics,feminists - just about everybody. How would the Catholic Church reactto the news that God really is dead? What would atheists do if theydiscovered they'd been wrong all along? Would there be any reason toadhere to morality, knowing that God is no longer watching? And thegreatest mystery of all - why did He die?

I can't recommend thisbook highly enough for fantasy lovers who are tired of the eternalTolkien rehashes. If you're looking for a book that will make youthink about your life, laugh out loud, and groan with embarrassment -sometimes all at once - this is the book for you. Both Believer andSkeptic will enjoy the ideas mulled over in Towing Jehovah - but thethin-skinned should be warned to proceed at their own risk.

JohnC. Snider...

James Morrow's story is startingly original. God is dead, and his lifeless and massive body has fallen into the Atlantic Ocean. Anthony Van Horne, a disgraced oil tanker captain, is recruited by the angel Raphael to tow His body to a final resting place in the Arctic. The ensuing Odyssean voyage challenges the crew's perceptions about God and morality. The result is a divine exploration of the theory that religion is the opiate of the masses.

As original as the story is, it never quite rises to the grandeur of its themes, which isn't necessarily a criticism. This is a pleasant and entertaining reading experience, not a dour theocratic and philosophical analysis. Morrow seems to have sacrificed a degree of depth in exchange for loads of irony and dark comedy - not a bad trade.

Great premise: God has died, and his two-mile-long body is floating in the Atlantic. The angels have hollowed out a tomb in the Arctic ice, and the Vatican hires an oil tanker to tow God's corpse to its final resting place.

Despite how that might sound, the book didn't strike me as particularly irreverent (and I'm a practicing Catholic). In Morrow's universe, what counts is a sincere and thoughtful concern for truth and goodness and forgiveness. The run-of-the-mill Christians come off as foolish and only superficially "faithful," but the Jesuit scientist/theologian and the Carmelite nun are two of the more admirable characters. The dogmatic atheists come off as narrow-minded bigots, but the reflective atheists who actually care about truth and about saving people from suffering are okay.

The interesting questions that are raised by God's "death" aren't explored as well as they might have been, and the romance is unconvincing, but this is still an entertaining story.

The first book in James Morrow's "Jehovah" trilogy, "Towing Jehovah," introduces readers to the idea that God has, in fact, died, and His gigantic corpse is drifting in the Atlantic. Tanker captain Anthony Van Horn learns this from no less than a dying angel, while attempting to atone for an ecological disaster he caused. Soon, an emissary from the Vatican confirms it, and Van Horn is off to tow God's corpse to the Arctic to prevent it from decaying in the elements and to preserve whatever brain function God might have left.

At first glance, this might seem like a pithy, clever, and self-serving attack on religion in general and Christianity in particular. Nothing could be further from the truth. Like any intelligent satirist, Morrow attacks the extremes on both sides; it is imperative that the mission is kept a secret to keep it from a public that might not understand, and it becomes important to a society of gawdawful liberal humanists that God's body be destroyed so that no one ever discovers it. The humanists and atheists are the most obvious targets of Morrow's lampooning, and for good reason: the bourgeoisie snobbery they exhibit shows not only the narrowest of minds, but also one of the most hypocritical belief-systems on the planet (much like the fundamentalist Christians, who receive the lampoon-stick in the next book of the trilogy).

In fact, this book takes away one of the most ambiguous aspects of religion: the existence of God. What God's dead body does is FORCE people to accept that He was, at least at one time, quite real and quite alive. By taking God's existence as a matter of empirical fact instead of a matter of faith, "Towing Jehovah" can then outline a concrete, believable, and very real cosmology about the nature of God and the meaning of human existence - and, according to the story, that might just be what God was planning all along.

Morrow is an exceptional writer, although his style hasn't matured as much in this first book as it does in the other two. His ideas show a unique kind of absurdist creativity, but that's a good thing: it is only in the most absurd, extreme situations that philosophies and cosmologies can really be tested. Satirical science fiction may be the funniest way to do so, and the way that reaches the most people. What good is theology when one has to wade through twenty volumes of Aquinas, or try to understand Heidegger's convoluted language? By demonstrating philosophical possibilities, Morrow uses his exceptional talents to do his readers a favor. To that, one must raise the glass and toast his efforts. While Morrow's prose might not be Nabokov's, there is certainly enough allusion to keep it fresh and enough poetry to keep it timeless, regardless of the subject matter. All in all, the first part in a truly exceptional work of art.

James Morrow has made eschatological science fiction and fantasy his domain over the past ten years. He started with the short stories "Bible Stories for Adults", which garnered him a Nebula award, then quickly followed up with a novel in the same vein, 1990's Only Begotten Daughter, in which the second coming of God comes in the female form. His latest novel, Towing Jehovah, continues his study of modern religion with the ultimate test of faith--the Death of God.

Anthony Van Horne is a disgraced oil freighter Captain who lost his post after a disastrous collision with a reef in the Gulf of Mexico that spilled crude over a 20 mile stretch of Texas coastline. His ablutions prove fruitful, because it is he who the archangel Raphael chooses to helm the most important salvage operation of all time. Yes, God is dead and floating supine in tropical waters. The angels, who are dying of empathy, have carved him a tomb in the Antartic and want Van Horne to take control of his recently repaired oil freighter, find the Corpus Dei, and tow it to its icy grave.

Joining Van Horne is Thomas Ockham, the controversial New York priest cum physicist, personally selected by the Vatican in consultation with the archangel Gabriel to be the spiritual leader of the expedition. The Vatican has its own goal--due to the calculations of its powerful computer OMNIVAC, it has determined that due to the size of the corpse, brain death may not have fully occurred, and the faster the corpse is frozen, the better the chance that God's neurons might be saved. Along the way, Van Horne rescues Dr. Cassandra Fowler, adrift in the tropics due to a failed trip to the Galapagos Islands in a recreation of Darwin's famous voyage in the Beagle. Unbeknownst to Van Horne, Fowler is a member of a radical feminist/atheist organization and is determined to sink Van Horne's cargo instead of taking the chance that the current patriarchal system use it as proof of the gender of the creator just as feminist advances had made such inroads against the system.

Morrow's novel is both audacious and extremely funny. While some find his eschatological studies sacrilegious, I do not think that is his intent (beyond the obvious establishment nose-tweaking). Morrow, in true science fiction fashion, is postulating "What If," but instead of writing about starships and aliens, Morrow examines culture and religion. For his background sources he utilizes the work of Kant, Thomas Moore, and Heigel, following the long tradition of philosophers trying to explain the ultimate mystery of creation. While Morrow's text is serious in its intent, it remains a modern novel, full of character and events, some of which may also offend gentler sensibilities. For those willing to play what if, however, Morrow has found his niche, and he continues to mine gold.

God is dead. Damn. Now what? What to do with the body? Who is to know about His death? Who gets invited to His funeral? More to the point, what will happen to humanity if word of His death gets out? And an even more interesting question: what did He die from?!

Jame Morrow's book, Towing Jehovah is a delight to read. A divine comedy, one could say. It was published in 1994 by Harvest Books, Harcourt Brace & Company, 525 B Street, San Diego, California 92101 USA. ISBN 0-15-600210-8 with 371 pages.

The Vatican hires Captian Anthony Van Horne to command a supertanker and tow Jehovah to His final resting place in the Arctic. Along the way he encounters love, mutiny, debauchery, dispondant angels, starvation, millitant (very!) atheists (who don't act anything like atheists,) and, eventually, personal salvation--- a salvation of his own making, and which he pays dearly for. The book is pure satire, with a very baroque world-view. In Morrow's book, Dostoyevsky's claim that "without God, everything is permitted" gets the bit in its teeth and runs wild.

The Divine Corpse is two miles long, floating face up in the Atlantic Ocean--- with a serene, rather pleased smile on Its face. It's a long way to the Arctic. Feminists want the body destroyed, since God really was male after all; the atheists want the body destroyed for, well, all the obvious reasons. Van Horne wants to preserve the body and prove to his father that he can get the job done, no matter the problems.

One of the things I didn't like about the book was the way the millitant atheists behaved: when presented with news that God actually does (er, did) exist, they do not accept the fact like most atheists would and become theists: instead they decide to sink God's body (all but one atheist, who castigates them for the hypocrites they are), for the good of humanity.

Another satirized issue was how people behaved once they knew with certainty that God is not watching them: in the book, some of th! em degenerate into hedonistic beasts, with only sex and alcohol (beer, wine, or gin) on their minds. I cannot conceive this being a valid response to the death of God: moral and ethical behavior is not predicated upon the existance of God or a belief in God, though many theists believe otherwise: I think Morrow understand this--- that's why he is satirizing the belief.

... You see the corpse of God being towed by a supertanker on the cover. The back cover starts with "God is dead" and proceeds to promise a tale full strange and troubled characters who are called on to deal with his rotting corpse. Morrow gets high marks doing an excellent job researching and explaining how an oil tanker operates. He does raise some interesting topics to consider: if God is the source of morality, does that mean we have free reign to do as we please after he dies? How could God die? However, it fails to even mention other interesting questions: if God is dead what becomes of those in heaven? What of Satan?

Despite the high marks for the idea and the setting, the execution leaves something to be desired.

I had three main complaints. The first is the relatively shallow characterization of most everyone in the book. The "romance" between the militant feminist and the tanker captain was probably the most egregious example of this, as the author gives nowhere near enough insight into the characters to make this believable. But it pervades the book. The nun Miriam dances naked with a priest in the belly button of God, yet neither one of them is ever seen really examining their actions. Indeed, that scene is the last we ever see of Miriam in the book. The characters who take part in the grizzly Roman coliseum style execution are never seen examining themselves and their actions.

Secondly, the entire sojourn on Van Horne island felt contrived. Worse than contrived it raises the question of what power could have arranged for it to happen? If God is dead what force could cause an island to form where none had ever been? If God is dead who worked the miracle of his return? If God is dead what is the source of the mysterious fog? Yet the characters barely think to question the situation.

Finally, the final resolution felt poorly constructed. The characters ask the question, "Who has the right to take away belief in God?" Rather than engage in any interesting and vigorous debate on the subject -- "Do people have a 'right' to believe in God in the first place?", "Does the Truth trump concerns of Faith?", "What man has the right to second guess the desires of the Almighty?" -- the characters mumble agreement and the book is suddenly over. The ending feels especially [small] in light of the sequel, where God's death has been made public and, in fact, his corpse turned into a theme park.

The unfortunate thing is how much promise this book has.

What happened when the god YHWH decided humanity has grown up and no longer needs its surrogate daddy in the sky? Why, he commited suicide of course! After all--- children growing up makes their parents obsolete. (Ask any ancient Greek playwrite.)

In my opinion this is a very good book. Not great, but good. The characters seemed to act contrary to real life, but then, this IS a fantasy.

The "atheists" in the book want to destroy the body of the god. That makes zero sense at all here in real life: if a god ever showed up, atheists would no longer be atheists. It makes no sense for atheists to want to hide the fact that a god existed, let alone died.

In the book, the Roman Catholic Church also wanted to hide the fact that the god was dead: that is directly counter the wishes of the god. The whole point of the god dying, and falling to Earth on the equator and prime meridian (0 latitude, 0 longitude) was so that huanity could see that it was dead. To hide the body was counter the god's wishes. Wouldn't the god have know its body would be hidden, and the god's plans thwarted?

What really struck me as absurd in the book is its major premis: people who know a god is dead will tend to become homicidal, suicidal, and psychotic rapiists. The book's premis is that humanity requires belief in a god for humanity to behave itself. What utter absurdity! Real life shows the exact opposite: atheists are vastly under-represented in the United States Penal System (for example). The USA has 14.7% atheists, but less than one percent of the prison population is atheist. If the book's chief premis were valid, there ought to be at least 14.7% atheists in prison.

The book is VASTLY funny, with cool dry wit. It is a very good read, and I recomend it.

I became aware of James Morrow because I happen to live in the same town as him. He's made the local news a few times as his books have been banned by religious conservatives. This is my first novel of his and I can see what the fuss is about. There are some truly hysterical plot elements in this story, like God's corpse floating in the ocean, a sinful civilization rising from the sea, and a rambunctious World War II reenactment that ends up with as much carnage as the real thing. There are some gaps in the plot madness, and a few boners like two characters near the end of the book observing the Milky Way from the middle of Manhattan (remember: light pollution). But those glitches are minor. While your mind reels at the bizarre concepts of the plot, Morrow injects some heavy sermonizing on the state of Christianity, from a clear rationalist and atheist perspective. This is the source of the religious trouble, but folks who ban books think you are too weak to think for yourself. There is real food for thought here, and while it might not be digestible for everybody, you can still find this novel to be one of the more bizarre and entertaining things you've read in a while.