Bernard Schweizer

How is it possible to at once be furious with God and not believe in Him at all?

From the novel: “God hates us more than we can hate Him, and we do not deserve that hate, and therefore against God we are always in the wrong… Well, that’s our relationship with God in brief, isn’t it?… We are ‘lucky’ that God is angry with us, ‘lucky’ that He made us, and even when we have not behaved badly in the vineyard and have done nothing bad at all, we should still bow and scrape, and murmur, like my father’s poor parishioners going down on their knees, ‘My mistake, my mistake, I am lucky that You are angry with me’—all because Adam, who was anyway created by this hateful tyrant and might not have wanted to be created, this poor Adam, ate the luckless apple. Oh when will humans murder this devilish concept of God?”

It’s been over a decade since the final installment of Philip Pullman’s subversive fantasy trilogy was published, with no new work in sight. So what are devotees of Oxford’s Rebel Angel to do? Well, they could do worse than to remember an old hand at religious satire: Anatole France. While my local big-box bookstore doesn’t carry a single one of his titles, this Nobel Prize winner (for literature, 1921) is among the world’s greatest satirists. He is also the writer of a clever piece of speculative fiction, Revolt of the Angels (1914), that comes across a bit like Pullman—drunk on sacramental wine.