Grave new world Nicholas Mosley’s Inventing God BY PETER KEOUGH

If you’re pushing 80 and have written a dozen novels and have won a Whitbread Award (for Hopeful Monsters in 1990), you can get away with a title like Inventing God. Actually, Nicholas Mosley is something of an inventing god himself, a creator of fictional universes that challenge preconceptions about the one we are rumored to live in. He is the champion of the "novel of ideas" (he recently withdrew from an award committee because he said no such novels were being written). Which, at its best, is a literary world sprung from a beguiling concept, the word made flesh.

Inventing God is neither the novel of ideas at its best nor Mosley at his, but it is challenging, prophetic, and at times revelatory. As the title suggests, one of its ideas is Voltaire’s old notion that if God did not exist, we would have to invent (a word that in Voltaire’s time meant "discover") Him. A provocative notion to bring up at a class in a Beirut university where many of the students have fresh memories of the abominations performed on behalf of their own invented gods, Christian and Muslim. But anthropology and social-studies lecturer Dr. Richard Kahn is a bit of a provocateur who despite his seeming hedonism and anarchy does want to stir up some good in the world. (In fact, he stirs up the interest of Leila, one of his students, who becomes his mistress and a co-conspirator, of sorts.) Besides, just because God is invented doesn’t mean He doesn’t exist.

The God that Kahn has a hand in inventing is Maurice Rotblatt, another speculator on the divine whose irreverent remarks ("all sacred cows," he declares, "spread mad cow disease"), carelessly bruited around this religiously volatile town, result in his disappearance. Has he been kidnapped? Did he flee to a Kurdish village where they worship angels? Kahn falls into a cellar and breaks his leg and invents a story that the cellar contained Rotblatt’s tomb, that Rotblatt’s bones were there but he might not be really dead. And via the Internet and the alchemy of rumors, a new Christ figure is patented.

Kahn isn’t the only person who falls into a hole and emerges reborn with a story to tell. In the opening chapters, several other characters — including Maisie, an anorectic London teenager obsessed with death, and her friend Dario, a gay seeker of truth and rough trade; Hafiz, a Muslim biologist from Beirut, and his Christian friend Joshua; and Lisa, a Jewish teenager from Jerusalem obsessed with the Holocaust — follow a similar pattern of descent and ascension.

Unwittingly, instinctively, they become part of a grander story of nascent design and uncertain outcome. It involves, in part, a search for a weapon of mass destruction developed by the Arabs, and perhaps the Israelis, too, that can genetically pinpoint and destroy specific races. Like the rest of the novel, these passages are at times frustratingly oblique, with a shadowy man in a panama hat watching or being watched by surveillance cameras in unnamed locations (is that Iraq?), with vaguely familiar faces (is that Saddam?), with shocking consequences (is this September 11?).

More allusive but more compelling than the topical references are, of course, the ideas behind them — specifically the notions of inventing God and storytelling in general. As Rotblatt notes, the need for God is a need for meaning and order and freedom, and

if one recognised the need, and tried to imagine or invent a response to it truly — putting it to the test, that is, in one’s daily life, in one’s relations with other people — then it did begin to seem that such an invention was true; that what had been conjectured appeared, when tested, to fit the facts of one’s experience; to work. Or if it did not, it could be amended — and what could be more scientific than that!

Or more æsthetic: the other part of this litmus test seems more a matter of taste than objective judgment, requiring an innate human ability to tell a good story from a bad one and recognizing its validity "like an artist knows rightness in his work of art."

As for Mosley’s own story, it sometimes confuses synchronicity with contrived coincidences, and as might be expected from a novel packed with lecturers and lectures, it reads now and then as if it had been written by David Hume. Mosley also has a hypnotic habit of according his characters little inquisitive asides that can deteriorate into irritating hiccups of self-consciousness.

On the other hand, there are moments — such as the astounding convergence of characters and events that occur at the conclusion — that could be described as divine. "Yes that is exactly right!" a character witnessing these things reflects. "I mean people will see that is right!" I agree.