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Godhead #3
The Eternal Footman
Dealing with the Death of God
With the publication of The Eternal Footman, James Morrow brings to a close one of the most audacious, brilliantly sustained accomplishments in recent American the Godhead Cycle. This "trilogy," which is really a set of interrelated, essentially independent theological comedies, began in 1994 with the World Fantasy Award-winning Towing Jehovah and continued, three years later, with Blameless in Abaddon. As Morrow tells us in his acknowledgments, the novels can be read singly, sequentially, or in any order at all. However you choose to do it, I strongly recommend that you read all three. They are simply too good to ignore.
In Towing Jehovah, the two-mile-long corpse of God the Father is found floating in the North Atlantic. Anthony Van Horne, disgraced captain of the supertanker Carpco Valparaiso, is commissioned by the Vatican to tow the body (known thereafter as the Corpus Dei) to its final resting place in the Arctic Sea. In Blameless in Abaddon, the Corpus Dei drifts away from that final resting place and comes to the attention of a consternated world.
Shortly afterward, medical testimony indicates that God is not entirely dead. Though deeply comatose, He retains a degree of neural activity and eventually finds Himself bound over for trial in the International Court of Justice in The Hague. There, Martin Candle -- a sort of latter-day embodiment of Job -- prosecutes Him, on behalf of the world's victims, for crimes against humanity.
The Eternal Footman opens ten years after the initial discovery of the Corpus Dei, which, by this time, has begun to come apart. God's flesh has completely dissolved, while His skull -- after vomiting out its own brain -- has detached itself from the body and ascended into the heavens, where it floats above the Western Hemisphere in geosynchronous orbit, a tangible symbol of mortality. Beneath that symbol -- the governing image of this book -- Morrow has constructed a very funny, very moving comedy about love, death, and existential dread in the post-theistic age.
Morrow drives a large cast of characters -- some new, some familiar from earlier volumes -- through a picaresque plot dominated by a single, central the plague of fetches. Early in the narrative, Nora Burkhart -- a widowed ex-schoolteacher with a previously unsuspected capacity for heroism -- learns that her only son, Kevin, has literally been invaded by a lethal doppelganger named Quincy. Quincy is a the tangible manifestation of Kevin's death and the embodiment of what T. S. Eliot called the Eternal Footman. Under Quincy's parasitic influence, Kevin becomes gravely, perhaps terminally, ill. Immediately afterward, fetches begin to proliferate across the hemisphere, bringing death and despair to an already bewildered populace.
Nora's stubborn determination to save her son leads her on an odyssey across the blighted landscape of a world suffering from "theothanatopsis syndrome," a fatal preoccupation with the death of God. Nora's journey is the central thread in a complex narrative that moves from Massachusetts to Mexico and from the world of a traveling theater troupe to the drug-induced dream worlds of cities known as Deus Absconditus and Holistica. In the course of her travels, Nora's story intertwines with those of the novel's other principal participants. Included among them are Anthony Van Horne, who once towed Jehovah to His arctic tomb; Adrian Lucido, psychoanalyst, charlatan, and corrupt founder of the Church of Earthly Affirmation; and Gerard Korty, world-renowned sculptor. Much of The Eternal Footman concerns the creation of Korty's masterpiece, the "Stone Gospel," which is directly inspired by a book called Parables of the Post-Theistic Age by Towing Jehovah's Thomas Ockham. In the "Stone Gospel," Korty gives concrete form to the novel's animating humanist the vision of a world no longer dominated by the vast, transcendental abstractions of the Age of Christianity. In Ockham's words, "If the coming era must have a religion, then let it be a religion of everyday miracles and quotidian epiphanies, of short eternities and little myths. In the post-theistic age, let Christianity become merely kindness, salvation transmute into art, truth defer to knowledge, and faith embrace a vibrant doubt."
No brief summary can do more than suggest the scope and quality of Morrow's achievement, both in The Eternal Footman and in the equally ambitious novels that preceded it. No summary can adequately convey the constant play of wit, learning, and intellectual rigor that Morrow brings to this entire astonishing enterprise. The Godhead Cycle is unlike anything that has appeared in American fiction in recent years, and it deserves serious, widespread attention. All three volumes are consummate examples of the satirist's art, and they are going t...
359 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1999
13 people are currently reading
493 people want to read
About the author
James K. Morrow
102 books328 followersBorn in 1947, James Kenneth Morrow has been writing fiction ever since he, as a seven-year-old living in the Philadelphia suburbs, dictated “The Story of the Dog Family” to his mother, who dutifully typed it up and bound the pages with yarn. This three-page, six-chapter fantasy is still in the author’s private archives. Upon reaching adulthood, Jim produced nine novels of speculative fiction, including the critically acclaimed Godhead Trilogy. He has won the World Fantasy Award (for Only Begotten Daughter and Towing Jehovah), the Nebula Award (for “Bible Stories for Adults, No. 17: The Deluge” and the novella City of Truth), and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award (for the novella Shambling Towards Hiroshima). A fulltime fiction writer, Jim makes his home in State College, Pennsylvania, with his wife, his son, an enigmatic sheepdog, and a loopy beagle. He is hard at work on a novel about Darwinism and its discontents.
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Displaying 1 - 29 of 29 reviews
May 1, 2008
The final story in Morrow's "Godhead Trilogy", after the surreal sea saga "Towing Jehovah" and the Jobian courtroom drama "Blameless in Abaddon", is a baroque, tragicomic book about the fear of death and the nature of oblivion in a post-theistic world. God's grinning skull (all that remains of him at this point) goes into geosynchronous orbit over the Western hemisphere, a second moon and a grim, never-ending reminder of mortality. In Morrow's America, this leads to the appearance of a race of pale doppelgangers, "fetches" as they are known, who seek out their terrestrial counterparts and begin to inhabit them, a sort of corporeal form of death awareness, until the hosts go catatonic and expire themselves.
The story revolves around two protagonists. The first is Nora Burkhart, a florist from Boston whose beloved son Kevin is the first to meet his fetch. The second is Gerard Korty, a reclusive sculptor once famed for creating a likeness of the Holy Madonna so moving and true that it actually could renew a person's faith. Their destinies become intertwined when a modern-day demagogue named Adrian Lucido convenes a new church in the Mexican jungle, hiring Korty to create idols for his new gods. Hearing reports that this new religion can cure people of their doppelgangers, Burkhart stops at nothing to ferry her prostrate son across a continent.
As is always the case with Morrow, his imagination knows no limit, and his ability to combine seemingly disparate story elements into something cohesive puts him one up on contemporary Tom Robbins. Along the way, Burkhart gets caught in the crossfire of anti-Semitic wars, hitches her wagon to an itinerant Greek theatre troupe, and ultimately meets with Anthony Van Horne, the tanker captain once responsible for hauling God's dead body to Antarctica, now reduced to running a seafaring brothel in New Orleans. Together they travel to the new church in Mexico, where the sculptor Korty is battling a crisis of conscience, realizing he is the only man capable of keeping the volatile Lucido from being consumed by his own power and increasingly dangerous ambitions.
Morrow's own humanist attitude seems to be at peace with the nature of death, and it is reflected throughout the book. Though never explicitly stated, it becomes clear that the relationship a character has with his fetch is a reification of how that person views death. Nora's son Kevin, a moody and Nietzschean youth to begin with, is one of the fetches' first targets; Nora herself, on the other hand, is so fearless in her pursuit of Kevin's cure that her own fetch is held at bay completely, even going so far as to aid her in her quest. And without giving anything away, the book (and trilogy) ends on a peaceful, introspective coda, one of the characters in a comfortable dotage, bemused and reflecting on the meaning of a well-lived life.
"The Eternal Footman" is both a fitting end to Morrow's great excursion into a world after God as well as a wonderfully thorny riff on life, death, philosophy and love. It does stand fully on its own, though it ought to be read as the conclusion to the Godhead Trilogy to be fully appreciated.
The story revolves around two protagonists. The first is Nora Burkhart, a florist from Boston whose beloved son Kevin is the first to meet his fetch. The second is Gerard Korty, a reclusive sculptor once famed for creating a likeness of the Holy Madonna so moving and true that it actually could renew a person's faith. Their destinies become intertwined when a modern-day demagogue named Adrian Lucido convenes a new church in the Mexican jungle, hiring Korty to create idols for his new gods. Hearing reports that this new religion can cure people of their doppelgangers, Burkhart stops at nothing to ferry her prostrate son across a continent.
As is always the case with Morrow, his imagination knows no limit, and his ability to combine seemingly disparate story elements into something cohesive puts him one up on contemporary Tom Robbins. Along the way, Burkhart gets caught in the crossfire of anti-Semitic wars, hitches her wagon to an itinerant Greek theatre troupe, and ultimately meets with Anthony Van Horne, the tanker captain once responsible for hauling God's dead body to Antarctica, now reduced to running a seafaring brothel in New Orleans. Together they travel to the new church in Mexico, where the sculptor Korty is battling a crisis of conscience, realizing he is the only man capable of keeping the volatile Lucido from being consumed by his own power and increasingly dangerous ambitions.
Morrow's own humanist attitude seems to be at peace with the nature of death, and it is reflected throughout the book. Though never explicitly stated, it becomes clear that the relationship a character has with his fetch is a reification of how that person views death. Nora's son Kevin, a moody and Nietzschean youth to begin with, is one of the fetches' first targets; Nora herself, on the other hand, is so fearless in her pursuit of Kevin's cure that her own fetch is held at bay completely, even going so far as to aid her in her quest. And without giving anything away, the book (and trilogy) ends on a peaceful, introspective coda, one of the characters in a comfortable dotage, bemused and reflecting on the meaning of a well-lived life.
"The Eternal Footman" is both a fitting end to Morrow's great excursion into a world after God as well as a wonderfully thorny riff on life, death, philosophy and love. It does stand fully on its own, though it ought to be read as the conclusion to the Godhead Trilogy to be fully appreciated.
May 14, 2015
So you've killed God, dumped his body in the ocean, dragged him out of the ocean to put him on trial and then shot his head into space where it turns into a giant skull in a sort of geosynchronous orbit grinning down on everyone . . . what the heck do you do for an encore?
Suffice to say that Morrow's books aren't always for the closed-minded, he's not afraid to tweak organized religion (specifically Christianity in this case, one of the minor downsides to the book is that he doesn't go all out and have some fun with the other religions of the world, who are no doubt sad at being left out) and by extension anyone who would believe in something blindly and doesn't make a whole lot of rational sense on the face of it, especially if the believing in it winds up causing a lot of sorrow to people simply because you don't know how to mind your own business. He can be accused to preaching to the converted slightly, for while it's often stinging satire there's nothing much here that would convince anyone not so inclined to lean this way themselves, which sometimes makes books like this run the risk of appealing to an audience that can only nod smugly at each other, content in knowing that they are so much more enlightened than the masses. To Morrow's credit, he never comes off as snooty or, dare I say, holier than thou, even though he treats the scenario seriously, the core of it is ridiculous enough that it's hard to believe that anyone is meant to extrapolate this literally to the "real world". The cover of the book looks like a rejected X-Men adventure, or a dream that Indiana Jones has after one too many pizzas.
I don't know if this was ever intended as a trilogy (I read the first two books almost exactly ten years ago and the only details I remember rhyme with "God's giant corpse") but in this volume we take up the story of widowed schoolteacher Nora and, separately, the adventures of master sculptor Gerard Korty. We enter into a world that is in a bit of turmoil having to see God's giant skull grinning down on them day after day (he gets some nice imagery by playing with reflections and superimpositions, and one great bit of humor with the Vatican selling the forehead as the world's best advertising space) and while things are gradually going to whatever-replaces-hell in terms of society, we are also starting to see people being struck down by a plague that has its roots in a existential awareness of death . . . now that we have proof that the afterlife no longer exists, people are just slowly starting to lose the will to live. To that end they often encounter their death in the form of "fetches", beings that look just like them that inhabit their dying bodies and occasionally come out to chat extensively with whoever is in the area. Sometimes they make incredibly morbid jokes just to lighten the mood. When Nora's son starts to go through the stages of the plague, she steals a van and tries to find a place that will cure him. Cue the sculptor and his weird capitalist master!
One gets the sense that being this is the last book in a trilogy Morrow was simply shoving all the ideas that he didn't have room for in the previous two books and there is a bit of "kitchen sink storytelling" feel to the proceedings, especially when she runs into various travails on her way to wherever she's going. The story rambles a bit in those moments, as Nora encounters armies at a golf course, a troupe of performers putting on plays starring Gilgamesh, and as she travels through America it often feels like a low-key version of something a bit more detailed, vague echoes of other SF "hey the world just ended what now" books like "Earth Abides" and since it tends to feel like it's coasting on our memories of other apocalypses it has the effect of lessening the impact of the satire slightly. I had no reason to walk in expecting "The Stand" but the marriage of weirdness with the English schoolteacher version of "Mad Max" doesn't quite always work, and this hinders the dramatic weight slightly.
Things do improve when we focus more on what's going on with Korty and capitalist Adrian Lucido's attempt to start a new world religion so that people stop dying from the plague because they have something as equally goofy as before to believe in. These scenes, where Korty is tasked with sculpting these new gods, feel closer to the heart of what he's really trying to say here (while the earlier scenes feel more like a game of "Gee, wouldn't it be fun if?"), a point driven home when we start to get glimpses of the future. It's not a future that will seem surprising to anyone who isn't a little bit on board with what Morrow is trying to do here, and while it's interesting it also winds up being a bit more "tell" than "show, as if Morrow was frustrated in how to get his point across and decided to just lay the philosophy out. He thankfully doesn't go all "Atlas Shrugged" on us but it's definitely clear he's waging a battle over where the line is between "entertaining" and "learning".
For the most part he sticks to being entertaining, and manages to maintain control even the as villain goes way off the rails on the crazy train (you know the shoe is going to drop and it's staged nicely but it's a weird injection of horror that comes a little out of left field), bringing all the various stories home and pretty much wrapping up all the loose ends in the trilogy nicely. The end result winds up being a bit of an odd beast, so desperate to convey sometimes and yet not seem like it's conveying that it bends over backwards to seem goofy but throughout it all his main point shines through: no matter what you believe, in religion or otherwise, all we can really know for sure is we have this world here, and each other. And just because nobody gets out alive, it doesn't mean that you shouldn't feel a responsibility to make sure the equally tiny flickers of light that are the future generations have a chance as well, and that if you keep ascending, it doesn't matter if you never come face to face with whoever is manning the engines. Or if there's anyone at all.
Suffice to say that Morrow's books aren't always for the closed-minded, he's not afraid to tweak organized religion (specifically Christianity in this case, one of the minor downsides to the book is that he doesn't go all out and have some fun with the other religions of the world, who are no doubt sad at being left out) and by extension anyone who would believe in something blindly and doesn't make a whole lot of rational sense on the face of it, especially if the believing in it winds up causing a lot of sorrow to people simply because you don't know how to mind your own business. He can be accused to preaching to the converted slightly, for while it's often stinging satire there's nothing much here that would convince anyone not so inclined to lean this way themselves, which sometimes makes books like this run the risk of appealing to an audience that can only nod smugly at each other, content in knowing that they are so much more enlightened than the masses. To Morrow's credit, he never comes off as snooty or, dare I say, holier than thou, even though he treats the scenario seriously, the core of it is ridiculous enough that it's hard to believe that anyone is meant to extrapolate this literally to the "real world". The cover of the book looks like a rejected X-Men adventure, or a dream that Indiana Jones has after one too many pizzas.
I don't know if this was ever intended as a trilogy (I read the first two books almost exactly ten years ago and the only details I remember rhyme with "God's giant corpse") but in this volume we take up the story of widowed schoolteacher Nora and, separately, the adventures of master sculptor Gerard Korty. We enter into a world that is in a bit of turmoil having to see God's giant skull grinning down on them day after day (he gets some nice imagery by playing with reflections and superimpositions, and one great bit of humor with the Vatican selling the forehead as the world's best advertising space) and while things are gradually going to whatever-replaces-hell in terms of society, we are also starting to see people being struck down by a plague that has its roots in a existential awareness of death . . . now that we have proof that the afterlife no longer exists, people are just slowly starting to lose the will to live. To that end they often encounter their death in the form of "fetches", beings that look just like them that inhabit their dying bodies and occasionally come out to chat extensively with whoever is in the area. Sometimes they make incredibly morbid jokes just to lighten the mood. When Nora's son starts to go through the stages of the plague, she steals a van and tries to find a place that will cure him. Cue the sculptor and his weird capitalist master!
One gets the sense that being this is the last book in a trilogy Morrow was simply shoving all the ideas that he didn't have room for in the previous two books and there is a bit of "kitchen sink storytelling" feel to the proceedings, especially when she runs into various travails on her way to wherever she's going. The story rambles a bit in those moments, as Nora encounters armies at a golf course, a troupe of performers putting on plays starring Gilgamesh, and as she travels through America it often feels like a low-key version of something a bit more detailed, vague echoes of other SF "hey the world just ended what now" books like "Earth Abides" and since it tends to feel like it's coasting on our memories of other apocalypses it has the effect of lessening the impact of the satire slightly. I had no reason to walk in expecting "The Stand" but the marriage of weirdness with the English schoolteacher version of "Mad Max" doesn't quite always work, and this hinders the dramatic weight slightly.
Things do improve when we focus more on what's going on with Korty and capitalist Adrian Lucido's attempt to start a new world religion so that people stop dying from the plague because they have something as equally goofy as before to believe in. These scenes, where Korty is tasked with sculpting these new gods, feel closer to the heart of what he's really trying to say here (while the earlier scenes feel more like a game of "Gee, wouldn't it be fun if?"), a point driven home when we start to get glimpses of the future. It's not a future that will seem surprising to anyone who isn't a little bit on board with what Morrow is trying to do here, and while it's interesting it also winds up being a bit more "tell" than "show, as if Morrow was frustrated in how to get his point across and decided to just lay the philosophy out. He thankfully doesn't go all "Atlas Shrugged" on us but it's definitely clear he's waging a battle over where the line is between "entertaining" and "learning".
For the most part he sticks to being entertaining, and manages to maintain control even the as villain goes way off the rails on the crazy train (you know the shoe is going to drop and it's staged nicely but it's a weird injection of horror that comes a little out of left field), bringing all the various stories home and pretty much wrapping up all the loose ends in the trilogy nicely. The end result winds up being a bit of an odd beast, so desperate to convey sometimes and yet not seem like it's conveying that it bends over backwards to seem goofy but throughout it all his main point shines through: no matter what you believe, in religion or otherwise, all we can really know for sure is we have this world here, and each other. And just because nobody gets out alive, it doesn't mean that you shouldn't feel a responsibility to make sure the equally tiny flickers of light that are the future generations have a chance as well, and that if you keep ascending, it doesn't matter if you never come face to face with whoever is manning the engines. Or if there's anyone at all.
October 4, 2017
Another fun read from Mr. Morrow. Full of references to well-known and some not-so-well known Greek and Roman and other classic cultures and literary works. Philosophy and a form theological speculations bring to the forefront the authors endeavor to lampoon or satirize social structures.
Of his three Godhead novels, I liked this one a bit more than the others.
Of his three Godhead novels, I liked this one a bit more than the others.
August 2, 2017
Out of the Godhead series, not my most favorite.
March 9, 2018
This book is a sharp departure from the previous two in the trilogy. While all three touch on depressing subject matter (the physical corpse of the Christian god dropping into the ocean is a bleak subject in any framing), the previous two approach the subject matter with much more levity, and are a lot more pleasant to read. This one is just straight up depressing. There's still humor there, but it's buried beneath an obsession with meticulously describing plague, make-shift slaughter and the general collapse of mankind. Not inherently a bad book, but definitely not what I was looking for in the conclusion to an otherwise excellent trilogy.
June 20, 2022
This had a similar irreverent tone as the other books, but it didn't seem quite as absurdist as the earlier books, and I'm not entirely sure what the overall message was supposed to be, either. The whole thing about the "death awareness" plague didn't make a lot of sense to me either — it didn't seem to hit people who were particularly aware of their death, it seemed supernatural. I'm not sure I really understood the point.
Still, it was mildly entertaining, and I wasn't unhappy that I gave it a shot considering the strength of the other books.
2.5 of 5 stars
Still, it was mildly entertaining, and I wasn't unhappy that I gave it a shot considering the strength of the other books.
2.5 of 5 stars
February 19, 2025
Not my fave in the trilogy, but has is moments.
The tale is…loopy, absurd, and heartbreaking. It is also another of Morrow’s forays into ontology and thanatology via story.
I mostly enjoyed it, though.
If you want to ponder the ups and downs of plague, human imbecility, and Death, this one is for you.
Full disclosure: I had flu and high fever while I finished reading this novel, so feeling lousy may have shaped my opinion.
The tale is…loopy, absurd, and heartbreaking. It is also another of Morrow’s forays into ontology and thanatology via story.
I mostly enjoyed it, though.
If you want to ponder the ups and downs of plague, human imbecility, and Death, this one is for you.
Full disclosure: I had flu and high fever while I finished reading this novel, so feeling lousy may have shaped my opinion.
June 9, 2019
The final installment of the Godhead trilogy, "The Eternal Footman" is an affecting story of life after the death of God, including a plague of demons that are unleashed by God's decomposition. We are sincerely sad to part with many of the characters who fight so bravely to survive and ultimately reclaim human society.
June 29, 2020
Less cohesive than the previous two volumes in this trilogy, this one does have a lot of biting satire that is as relevant now as when it was written, but it's all over the place. Dive into any page and you'll find something darkly amusing even without the context of the rest of the book, let alone the trilogy. It goes for a joke when restraint could have made things a bit more cohesive.
October 7, 2024
I thoroughly enjoyed the Godhead series.
That said, I read the Kindle version of each book and found the typos in the third novel to be so very distracting. The error that I found most unsettling was that each occurrence of the letters "RN" in a word were rendered as an "M". Turning torn into tom, corn into com, learn into leam, and spurn into spum. Where are the editors?
That said, I read the Kindle version of each book and found the typos in the third novel to be so very distracting. The error that I found most unsettling was that each occurrence of the letters "RN" in a word were rendered as an "M". Turning torn into tom, corn into com, learn into leam, and spurn into spum. Where are the editors?
April 4, 2020
Plague and poverty of the mind overcome by vigilance. Nora is definitely precursor to the heroines of Last Witchfinder and Galapagos. I found myself a bit tangled in the richness of rhetoric and reference but still came out enlightened.
May 31, 2019
This was a bit darker than the first two books. It also made me uncomfortable because I could see people acting and reacting in those ways. Still, very well written. I recommend the trilogy.
April 29, 2021
Still a good story but Towing is my favorite of the three
July 21, 2021
The final volume in the series matches the quality of the first two. I feel like I should reread these books now. Maybe they're on Audible.
March 25, 2024
A fitting end to the loose trilogy!
June 1, 2024
Favorite Quote = “How does God live with himself? Simple. He doesn’t.”
September 3, 2024
Read the rest of the trilogy first but then dive into this master class of what a post apocalyptic novel should be.
June 7, 2023
Significantly darker than the first two books, while still retaining a detached sense of humor with some truly hilarious lines.
While book 2 was primarily a retelling of Job, culminating in an extended courtroom scene in which God is put on trial, this one has a horrific biblical plague and a harrowing post-apocalyptic struggle for survival, complete with Epic Journey. There are lengthy asides into several subjects, including art & sculpture, English literature, Greek mythology, theological debates between Erasmus and Martin Luther, and a [unnecessarily?] painstakingly detailed synopsis of the Epic of Gilgamesh.
There is a lot of death and a lot of suffering, and a lot of questioning our deepest held beliefs about good and evil, life and death.
Bottom Line: Incredibly ambitious, bitingly satirical, dark and funny, deep and thoughtful, brilliant and unrelenting.
While book 2 was primarily a retelling of Job, culminating in an extended courtroom scene in which God is put on trial, this one has a horrific biblical plague and a harrowing post-apocalyptic struggle for survival, complete with Epic Journey. There are lengthy asides into several subjects, including art & sculpture, English literature, Greek mythology, theological debates between Erasmus and Martin Luther, and a [unnecessarily?] painstakingly detailed synopsis of the Epic of Gilgamesh.
There is a lot of death and a lot of suffering, and a lot of questioning our deepest held beliefs about good and evil, life and death.
Bottom Line: Incredibly ambitious, bitingly satirical, dark and funny, deep and thoughtful, brilliant and unrelenting.
April 16, 2016
Storyline: 2/5
Characters: 2/5
Writing Style: 2/5
Resonance: 1/5
There was a brief moment when I thought this had potential..., but then I finished the first chapter....
This is the best of Morrow's Godhead trilogy. Morrow is more to the point and his allegories are more clear and consistent; overall the storyline is tighter. Though there are character and plot overlaps with the other books, one could read this as a stand alone novel. If one felt they simply had to read a Morrow book on God's death, I'd suggest this one and this one alone.
I can now slot the Godhead trilogy as the second on my list of "Series that I regret ever having begun". I'm glad its over; I don't foresee myself reading another James K. Morrow book.
Characters: 2/5
Writing Style: 2/5
Resonance: 1/5
There was a brief moment when I thought this had potential..., but then I finished the first chapter....
This is the best of Morrow's Godhead trilogy. Morrow is more to the point and his allegories are more clear and consistent; overall the storyline is tighter. Though there are character and plot overlaps with the other books, one could read this as a stand alone novel. If one felt they simply had to read a Morrow book on God's death, I'd suggest this one and this one alone.
I can now slot the Godhead trilogy as the second on my list of "Series that I regret ever having begun". I'm glad its over; I don't foresee myself reading another James K. Morrow book.
Read
December 21, 2008I read a lot of this in an airport. I’d like to reread it, as my memory of it isn’t as strong as for the previous two books in Morrow’s Godhead Trilogy. I liked the idea of the artist’s humanist sculpture celebrating man’s scientific and philosophical achievements, the way it encapsulates one of the things Morrow is always trying to get across in his books—that science, atheism, and humanism aren’t the artless, emotionless schools of thought that they’re always caracatured as being.
November 26, 2016
This is a story about what happens after God's death. I made it all the way to page 152 of 359 pages. At that point I had to give up. This book is written with all the emotion and personality of a history textbook. Even the action scenes were boring. The plot seems to be good but I just couldn't stay interested given the plodding pace and method of writing.
November 25, 2010
This was a relatively disappointing footnote to an otherwise brilliant trilogy. If you've read the first two, you'll be compelled to read this one. I say it was "relatively" disappointing; you won't be disappointed by reading it. It was a throwaway compared to the other two and in fact I'm struggling to remember much about it.
July 11, 2015
The third in the trilogy of God’s demise.
Not as funny as the previous two / a lot more doom&gloom (appropriately so). Darker, nastier, but more hopeful, in the end? Tough call. Black and sarcastic. And while not as funny as the first two, still pretty damn funny.
Morrow’s a genius. And there are still more books of his to read, oh happy day.
Not as funny as the previous two / a lot more doom&gloom (appropriately so). Darker, nastier, but more hopeful, in the end? Tough call. Black and sarcastic. And while not as funny as the first two, still pretty damn funny.
Morrow’s a genius. And there are still more books of his to read, oh happy day.
February 28, 2013
As usual, James Morrow books are funny, entertaining, and depressing all at the same time. This one, however, bucks the trend by being funny and depressing but not particularly entertaining. This book is 100 pages too long and would have worked better as a short story.
April 19, 2011
Like what else I've read by James Morrow, this book is frustrating yet compelling. Interesting ideas about religion and morality, and sometimes very funny, but some other parts of the grand scheme don't seem to add up.
January 3, 2008
nowhere near as good as the first two, very preachy and a little over the top, i guess what i mean is the author looses his subtle humor and just pushes an agenda that i cant get behind.
July 23, 2008
Wow - the Godhead Trilogy is something else, but this final volume fails to live up to the drama of the previous two.
Then again, an off-day for Mr Morrow is a great day from many others.
Then again, an off-day for Mr Morrow is a great day from many others.
February 4, 2013
not good
November 6, 2014
Not nearly as good as the 1st or 2nd in the trilogy. Somewhat disappointed.
Displaying 1 - 29 of 29 reviews