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More Defiance than Blasphemy:
Malcolm Scott in the Jewish Quarterly Autumn 1995:
When the imminent End of the World is announced on prime time television by the Archangel Gabriel speaking in all known languages, we are somewhat intrigued. Here is an author prepared to paint on the big canvas, to write for high stakes.
That Simon Louvish succeeds in developing his premise and involving us in the fate of his characters is a tribute to his wit, his intellect, his humanity and his craft. For a start he is a master ventriloquist. As the Dead rise up in preparation for the Day of Judgment, we encounter such luminaries as Ben Jonson and Karl Marx. The former develops a liking for W.C. Fields videos and convenience foods: ‘God’s lid, sir! How now young gentleman! Beshrew me! Will you join a poor player in a Tesco’s Frozen Special? Poulet de Loire, last of the Bejam Storebox, sirrah!” The latter suffers from frightful wind, but in the timing of his utterances speaks volumes.
In What’s Up, God? the farcical is never far away but it is always anchored in Louvish’s impressive pseudo-reality. Marx’s flatulence does not exist in a vacuum. In theatrical terms, the dialogue works because the scenery is so good. It is the creation of a wholly plausible new world order that is the author’s principal achievement.
Many have tried to create new world, to some extent every writer of fiction does just this. Louvish delights in exploring and expounding upon the creation. He relishes the nuts and bolts, the juicy minutiae of life under the new regime. Regarding it at one moment through the eyes of his hero’s militant, working-class Dad who sniffs a plot to oppress the proletariat; at another from the point of view of a Christian fundamentalist who, unable to relinquish the role of dotty outsider, sees the hand of Lucifer operating the new levers of power.
During this constant changing of the perspective from character to character and place to place, we begin to suspect that Louvish rather enjoys keeping us on our toes with his unpredictability. Having created a situation in which Man is largely powerless and becoming daily more aware of his limitations, we become increasingly dependent on the author to guide us through the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Indeed, as his hero flounders, Louvish’s power over us grows. Is this intentional, one wonders? Does Louvish desire more than the novelist’s usual quota of omnipotence? Does he see himself as God?
And let’s not forget the Jews. Our hero’s rabbinical relatives rise from the grave to drink fine Russian tea, but it is for the Hasidic Jews that Louvish reserves his appreciation. For them it’s business as usual with their assets transferred to the Holy Land; their synagogues and foundations to be reconstituted in Jerusalem.
Is God mocked in this book? Strictly speaking I imagine he is, but Louvish’s voice is not so much one of blasphemy as of defiance. Not for him is Pscal’s wager – the idea that the possibility of enduring infinite suffering in Hell makes it rational to believe in a vengeful God during one’s finite lifetime. He will not lie down meekly and take what comes squarely on the chin. He wriggles and squirms, looking for a way out, grasping for meaning in his new cicumstances. Trying to find out the score now that there’s been a fundamental change in the rules governing the human condition.
But ultimate meaning is hard to find and perhaps wisely we are left in the dark with a solitary candle of hope flickering before us. In Simon Louvish’s book we do not meet God; we don’t even meet a man who has. But after this delightfully strange journey we feel more prepared for the encounter.
Much of What’s Up, God? occurs underground, in bunkers, mine shafts and lifts, calling to mind Flann O’Brien’s Third Policeman. The parallels abound: Louvish’s hero is forever dreaming, but in a topsy-turvy world he’s never quite sure whether he is awake or not. The boundaries between sleep and wakefulness, life and death, become increasingly blurred. But Louvish throws in an element missing from the Irish classic: love.
In his youth our hero has loved a girl – Alice. Her untimely death has frozen their relationship into an epitome of romantic bliss… their carefree meanderings across Tuscany, their visit to the Sistine Chapel where, it is noted, God turns his back on the sinful. But when the Dead emerge, will the lovers meet and will their passions be capable of re-ignition? Is it not possible to return to a state, if not of Eden-like grace, then at least of relative purity? Is redemption possible? Is there any going back at all? The book’s romantic element works because of Louvish’s sure-footedness, his unsentimental way of dealing with the tenderest emotions.
Set as it is in the near future, What’s Up, God? can also be seen as a contribution to the ever-growing body of millenially-focused works. Personally in such moments I call to mind the abandonment of crops and sporadic hysteria cultivated by Man circa 999 A.D. But why not?
What better time could there be for a Second Coming? And if it came, how would it actually happen? For a guide to such profundities; for a ticket on the journey of a latter-day Icarus; for a defiant, human and very funny response to ultimate authority, you will have one hand on the bannister of the stairway to heaven if you read this book.(Honest, I didn’t pay this guy a penny! S.L.)
From the Church Times, Mike Starkey, 18 August 1995:
“ We appear to get the apocapypse that we deserve,” reflects one of the characters in this anarchic, irreverent novel. Each generation has had its own visions of the end times – Bruegel, Dore, Dante, Michelangelo, et al, each reading into the parousia their own contemporary obsessions. Louvish’s version, God help us, is `90’s junk culture writ large across the screen, even as the end credits of history roll.
The Day of Resurrection is set for 30 April 1999, and Judgement Day precisely one week later. President Quayle is in the White House, and Prime Minister Gummer in No. 10. The countdown to the final trump and beyond is seen from the standpoint of Jerry Davis, a failed stand-up comedian living in London. He watches, bemused, as the earth is deluged with an army of petty, bureaucratic angels with computers.
News of the great event is broken, not in flame across the skies, but by the Archangel Gabriel interviewed on TV by Jeremy Paxman. To the end, hapless humanist protesters line the streets bearing placards: “Democracy not Theocracy”, “God go Home.”
What’s Up, God? is written in a kind of breathless, mid-Atlantic slang. The result is something akin to Bladerunner meets The Great Divorce, with a script written by MTV. The playwright Ben Jonson emerges from his grave thinking only of his stomach; the resurrected Karl Marx belches repeatedly. Grattuitous obscenities abound.
A few genuinely touching moments manage briefly to surface, the parents reunited with long-dead offspring, the narrator’s anxiety at standing face to face with his resurrected girlfriend. And the nightmare visions towards the end are carried off with subtelty and skill. A thought-provoking, capable novelistlurks in there somewhere.
And occcasionally the humour provokes a wry smile. After his own death, Davis reflects: “Is this where I make a stand for a lawyer? But what’s the point; they’re all in hell anyway.”
Louvish, a tutor at the London Film School, is widely read and is an acute observer of human mores. He has his finger on the pulse of a disillusioned generation: this is a parousia without hope or excitement, without so much as a cameo appearance from Christ. The basis of Judgement is left open but appears to be being true to oneself. The question of God himself is left fashionably vague. Strange, since this ought to be his show.
However, any flashes of subtlety and intelligence are buried beneath the avalanche of puerility. At the end of the day, Louvish’s revelation reveals little more than the shallowness of so much mid-1990’s mass-media-saturated society. Pity our culture. Even the resurrection of the dead has become an excuse for jokes about farts and erections.
Mike Starkey is soon to be Priest-in-Charge of Brownswood Park, London.From the New Statesman & Society, by David V. Barrett, 18 August 1995:
What’s Up, God? (Gollancz, £15.99) could get Simon Louvish into trouble with the with the Fundamentalist Christmas. Its lampooning of the Second Coming is hard-hitting religious fantasy, in the recent tradition of Gore Vidal's Live From Golgotha and James Morrow's Towing Jehovah. On Christmas Day 1998, thousands of spaceships arrive above Earth and Gabriel announces that Resurrection Day will be on 30 April, with the judgement a week later.
Although the angels are hardly glorious representatives of heaven (they frantically flap their wings, but fail to remain airborne for more than a few seconds), and although someone in the celestial ranks should have thought through the overcrowding problem when all the Earth's dead are brought back to life, God himself doesn’t come in for much stick.
Most of the stick is reserved for us poor schmucks below. Gabriel is interviewed by Jeremy Paxman, desperately trying to remain cool. Headlines read "Gummer says Judgement Day No Threat to Law Abiding Citizens”. The narrator's parents try to resurrect their old SWP ideology, claiming the whole Second Coming malarkey to be a capitalist plot, while Fundamentalists who have proclaimed the Last Days for years are a bit miffed that God has stolen their thunder. Such are the ways of humanity, and Louvish unerringly pokes fun at the lot of us.
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