A family of deliciously detailed dysfunction is at the centre of Modern Gods, Nick Laird’s third novel. There’s Liz, the college professor based in New York, whose life is unravelling as she returns after a long absence to her (fictional) small Northern Irish home town of Ballyglass for her sister’s wedding. It will be Alison’s second marriage and no one, not even Alison, knows very much about her intended husband, Stephen. She rebuffed his attempt to confess what he did during the Troubles, which turns out to have been a very bad move.
Mum Judith is putting off telling the family that her cancer has returned; taciturn dad Kenneth, with his “remarkable gift for misery”, leaves angst in his wake wherever he goes. So far, so soap-opera-family-reunion (there’s also a youngest son carrying on an affair), although Laird, a poet and Mr Zadie Smith, handles dialogue superbly and salts his often darkly humorous prose with eye-catching imagery, even if he overdoes the triple-descriptor trick.
Modern Gods starts, though, with a gut-punching account of a loyalist paramilitary pub massacre (based on the real-life Greysteel mass shooting in 1993); passages describing the last moments of the victims lurk like shards of glass throughout the first half of the book. And as Liz turns her anthropologist’s eye on her Protestant community there emerges a sharp appraisal of the tribalism of this culture “infected by violence” and of the deeply damaging aspects of religion.
To hammer the point home, Laird sends Liz to the invented island of New Ulster, off the coast of Papua New Guinea, where she is to make a BBC documentary about a cargo cult community and its charismatic leader, Belef. The novel switches between Liz and her hapless crew’s increasingly fraught mission and the fallout from the unmasking of Stephen’s past back in Ballyglass. Laird is juggling with knives here, folding memories of the Troubles and a depiction of “exotic” otherness into his tale.
Strong characters help — Belef in particular is skilfully wrought, a woman driven by grief and a furious resistance to the evangelical American Christians invading the island. And Laird’s overarching concern, for individuals trapped by politics and religion, carries Modern Gods along on a tide of vigorous compassion.
Modern Gods by Nick Laird, 4th Estate, 308pp, £12.99
