Anyone who knows me knows that I have nary a bad word to say about anything Prof. Gray has published from "Straw Dogs" onward: I find his to be an incredibly lucid and relevant voice, which cuts through a suffocating miasma of contemporary cultural studies / philosophy writing. Unlike the majority of philosophical writers entrenched in the publish-or-perish academic environment, Gray's ideas themselves remain challenging and pertinent enough that he doesn't have to do hide them behind impenetrable walls of effusive verbiage and ephemeral jargon. What I especially like about Gray is that he treats all species of interesting thought as having critical value, not limiting himself to readings of the work by fellow researchers in his field: that is to say, J.G. Ballard (a regularly quoted Gray favorite) is treated in his writings as a cultural critic on par with, say, Bruno Latour. By sticking to his guns as such, he has even earned the respect of people much closer to this academic milieu I mention (e.g. Slavoj Zizek) and provides a tremendous inspiration for anyone who wishes to write on human nature without genuflecting before the small handful of "acceptable" Continental thinkers and theorists.
So, that said, this current book is no deviation from that standard of excellence. Gray states his case calmly and convincingly, and - as was done in both "Straw Dogs" and "Black Mass" - ends the often pessimistic ride with a surprisingly uplifting realization that mortality is not the curse it appears to be (of course, you'll have to read it in his far more erudite words to appreciate it, and I won't spoil it for you here.)
This book reads very much like a volume-length extension of a small episode in "Straw Dogs," wherein Gray cataloged a number of ridiculous beliefs among Soviet leadership dealing with perpetual progress and a fully-automated utopia. His discussion of the so-called "God builders" not only succeeds in showing how secular creeds have attempted to keep alive religious faith's promise of immortality, but shows the full extent to which bona fide religious imagery was rehabilitated in an atheistic culture (check, for example, the esoteric origins of the design of Lenin's tomb, as Gray describes it.) You're unlikely to find trenchant criticism of Marxist policy such as this anywhere else within the academic world- Gray unflinchingly states that "for Marx, the natural world had no intrinsic worth...only by being imprinted with human meaning could the earth have value," and this critique of short-sighted anthropocentrism is long overdue. Some of the books coming out of amusingly named "posthumanities" departments attempt to bring anthropocentrism down a notch while still supporting Marixan modes of thought, and Gray easily points out the hypocrisy inherent in embracing both the "otherness" of the natural world and an ideology that is totally inimical to it.
That said, illumination of Marxism's attempts at salvation is not the only thing on tap here, as the book deals a good deal with 19th-century British variants on trying to make consciousness survive physical death (in this case, at a time when the post-Darwin field of scientific naturalism was positing theistic belief as just another evolutionary mechanism, one which had no grounding in objective truth.) In fact, this comprises the first half of the book, building up chronologically to the "God Builders" episode. Gray's tour of "automatic writing" techniques, seances and other means of crossing death's threshold without actually dying, is tragic. Yet it makes us empathize with their practicioners rather than merely laughing at or mocking their folly. He is wise to remind us that these modes of paranormal experimentation are born out of things we all experience - the loss of loved ones - and that people adopting these practices are not a homogeneous mass of crazed individuals wishing to become as gods. A series of respectful period photographs of these individuals are included, seeming to reinforce Gray's empathy for them (this is the first title of his I know of that uses illustrations of any kind.)
All told, this book does not break that much new ground for Gray's thought, yet it provides a much more detailed illustration of ideas that he has touched on in the last decade. Readable, at times engrossing, and never inessential.
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