Modern Gods

Written by Nick Laird

Narrated by Deirdre O'Connell

A FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR

A powerful, thought-provoking novel about two sisters who must reclaim themselves after their lives are dramatically upended from one of our finest authors

Alison Donnelly has suffered for love. Still stuck in the small Northern Irish town where she was born, working for her father’s real estate agency, she hopes to pick up the pieces and get her life back together. Her sister Liz, a fiercely independent college professor who lives in New York City, is about to return to Ulster for Alison’s second wedding, before heading to an island off the coast of Papua New Guinea to make a TV show about the world’s newest religion.

Both sisters’ lives are about to be shaken apart. Alison wakes up the day after her wedding to find that her new husband has a past neither of them can escape. In a rainforest on the other side of the planet, Liz finds herself becoming increasingly entangled in the eerie, charged world of Belef, the subject of her show, a charismatic middle-aged woman who is the leader of a cargo cult.

As Modern Gods ingeniously interweaves the stories of Liz and Alison, it becomes clear that both sisters must learn how to negotiate with the past, with the sins of fanaticism, and decide just what the living owe to the dead. Laird’s brave, innovative novel charts the intimacies and disappointments of a family trying to hold itself together, and the repercussions of history and faith.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Release date: Jun 27, 2017
• ISBN: 9780008253547

Nick Laird

Nick Laird was born in Northern Ireland in 1975, and studied at Cambridge and Harvard. He is the author of two collections of poetry and the acclaimed novel ‘Utterly Monkey’. He currently teaches creative writing at Columbia University in New York.

Reviews for Modern Gods

[fhudnell-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The description of this book reads in part, "Both Liz and Alison are looking to be reborn, to be cleansed in some way, and the dramatic journeys that they take form the backbone of this compelling novel about trust, intimacy, complicity, religious belief, and the bonds of family life." I don't think that the person who wrote that summation actually read the book. Neither Liz nor Alison is "reborn" or "cleansed" here, and no one takes a journey (although they do both need to examine their own contributions to unfortunate events). The book opens with a terrorist attack on an Irish pub, in which several people are killed. The way in which this incident is woven into the story was the most interesting part of the book for me.The focus of the book is the Donnelly family, including the parents Judith and Kenneth, who both have serious health issues, and their grown children Liz, Alison and Spencer. Liz is an anthropologist living in New York who comes to Ireland for the second wedding of her younger sister Alison. Alison is marrying Stephen, a man with a tragic past, and she really should have listened to him when he tried to tell her about it before the wedding. After the wedding their marriage is severely challenged. Spencer's sole contribution to the book is to have a boring affair with a married woman. His character is given short shrift here and I have no idea why he was included in the book. There is also a dog who Liz smuggles into Ireland and dumps on her parents while she goes to New Guinea. The dog then disappears until the final pages of the book. Liz has been asked to fill in as host of a BBC documentary on a religious movement in New Ulster near Papua New Guinea. A woman called Belef has started a new religion there, combining local religions with Christianity. She communicates with the dead, including her daughter, in order to obtain the cargo that she sees going exclusively to the white people. Belef is a grieving mother who is part insane and part shrewd. The chapters of the book dealing with the film crew, the Christian missionaries and Belef and her followers were my least favorite.I found this book disjointed. Both the Belef story and the Irish story (to a lesser extent) deal with the role of religion in people's lives. Both Belef and Judith use religious rituals to deal with death, grief and illness. Religion is also a source of violent conflict in both settings and divides the Protestants and Catholics in Ireland and the Christian missionaries and Belef in New Guinea. However, I thought that the religious linkage didn't completely tie the two parts of the book together. I think that I would have been happier with just the Alison/Stephen storyline. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher.

[tomdonaghey · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Modern Gods (2017) by Nick Laird. This novel suffers from a split personality that left me feeling uncertain as to what the book was about. Was it an exploration of a dysfunctional Irish family? Was it a look into “Cargo” cults in and about Papua New Guinea (PNG)? Was it an examination of how religions battle over who has the “correct” path to eternal salvation? And as an added bonus, what was the opening scene of gun violence to do with the rest of the story?We mainly focus on the The Donnelly family of Northern Ireland. There is something wrong with every one of them, and each of these wrongs colors the story. The seemingly most normal of the bunch is the father, Ken, who owns the family realty business and doesn’t seem to like anyone. Judith is the wife who has a growth enlarging within her that seems inoperable. The son is sleeping with his best friend’s wife while the younger daughter is getting ready for her second marriage. It is this event that pulls Liz, the eldest child, back from America where she just caught her live-in boyfriend sleeping with another man.Almost two thirds of the novel centers about the complaints of this group, which are bad but not terrible, but things erupt the day after the wedding. It seems that the opening gun violence is directly aligned with the groom, automatically shifting the aspect of the novel.And then it shifts again in the next chapter. Directly after the wedding, Liz is on her way to New Ulster in PNG, there to host a BBC documentary about the world’s newest religion. A lot happens in the days to come, Liz’s eyes are opened to new concepts, ideas are dashed and reconstructed and the reader is left to figure out many things by themselves.What I drew from all this was, well I’m not certain. Was this story to be family troubles after the Troubles that plagued the North for so long. Or was this more about religion and how destructive it is. We have the missionaries working with the local government in an effort to destroy this new cult. We have Protestant vs. Catholic violence, even conflicts among the members of the family and the family against the community.My bet is on the woes inflicted upon us all in the name of religion. My version of God is better than your version of the same God. Modern Gods appears to bean attempt to illustrate just how corruptive religion is and can be.Well written with characters who live and breath, Modern Gods is a book that demands to be read more than once to find the depths of meaning it offers.

[ireneattolia · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

probably the best thing i've read this year

[bayleaf_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In Nick Laird’s new novel, Modern Gods, the politics of Northern Ireland runs parallel to that of Christian missionaries and an indigenous religious cult in New Ulster, Papua New Guinea. After a bad first marriage, Alison marries Stephen, only to later learn of his involvement as a member of the Irish Republican Army in a mass shooting. Her sister, Liz, also escaping a bad relationship, agrees to host a documentary for the BBC on the Story and its leader, Belef, and travels to Papua New Guinea, only to become enmeshed in the struggles there between the two religious factions. I found the alternating stories interesting, but the ending somewhat dissatisfying. Although describing her marriage, I do think Alison sums it up best. “A second marriage meant substituting old ceremonies and traditions with different ones, meant trading in the old gods for new, but Alison couldn’t help it; she didn’t believe in it any longer. She’d lost her faith and found the new gods were false gods.”