Behind the vicarage door

It's a brave literary critic who dares to expose himself to the judgment of his colleagues by publishing his own novel. Even braver to take as his theme the deeply unfashionable subject of religion and the quest for faith.

But with his debut fiction, The Book Against God, James Wood, former chief literary critic of The Guardian and author of an acclaimed collection of literary essays, The Broken Estate, has risked a mauling from the literary lions and written a fictional exploration of what it means to believe or not believe.

Thomas Bunting, troubled son of an Anglican vicar, is struggling to complete his PhD thesis on the Epicurean philosophers, while becoming increasingly obsessed with the vexed question of God and suffering.

Why does He allow such cruelty, injustice and pain to exist in a world of His own making? Why did He create imperfection rather than perfection?

Confused as a teenager by "the brutality of Easter" and the continual harping in church on the wretchedness of men - and enticed by the freedom which he believes unbelief will bring - Thomas begins to compile a dossier of arguments against the existence of God: The Book Against God.

As this obsession with God, or should I say campaign against God, takes over, so Thomas abandons his industrious pursuit of academic success, instead lolling about his flat in Islington or retreating to his childhood home in Durham while reading Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and forgetting the virtues of regular bathing.

Not surprisingly, given his propensity to lie his way out of confrontation (in petty evasions and childish acts of rebellion, smoking in secret and hiding bottles of whisky), and his reluctance to take on the responsibilities of adult life, he eventually alienates his wife Jane (a talented musician) and his best friend Max (a columnist on The Times).

His father, the vicar, meanwhile, is bemused by this transformation of his son from happy, believing child, the Duke of Grinaldi "because you were always grinning", to layabout drop-out, who stays in bed till noon, escapes to the pub for a glass or two, then creeps back home to forage once more among his real friends and allies, the philosophers, for yet more evidence against the Creator.

Thomas's doubts and his increasingly desperate search for answers should evoke sympathy. He is, after all, merely exposing what many of us feel but are too timid to voice.

But Thomas is revealed to us as such a deeply unlikeable person, with his stubble-cheeked sloth and mealy-mouthed nonchalance about the feelings of those around him, that we remain indifferent to his fate.