Author: James Morrow
Publisher: ---
Date: 1994
Format: --- pages, hardcover
The dust jacket calls Morrow "one of today's foremost satirists" --good thing, too, otherwise his literary deicide might be considered by some circles as bad taste. To begin...
God has died, and His body has fallen into the sea. The angels, rapidly expiring from terminal empathy, recruit human forces to tow the Divine Corpse from the equatorial Atlantic to the tomb they've carved in a Finnnish iceberg. The Vatican: Canadian pope INNOCENT XIV, Secretary of Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs TULLIO CARDINAL DiLUCA, and Father THOMAS WICKLIFF OCKHAM, Jesuit professor of cosmology and particle physics at Fordham University in the Bronx. The ship: the 1200-foot SS Carpco Valparaíso, the most powerful oil tanker ever built, recently recomissioned after a disastrous Texas spill. Its captain: 50-year-old ANTHONY VAN HORNE, disgraced and blacklisted skipper, the Butcher of Matagorda Bay, tormented by accusing visions of crude-slicked seabirds.
The Vatican computer predicts that God may still be capable of rescusitation, and Van Horne makes a personal commitment to freeze the corpse before the deadline. The Valparaíso sets course with Ockham, charged by the angel Gabriel with determining the cause of death; his friend, Carmelite nun SISTER MIRRIAM; a hastily-recruited crew of able seamen and -women; and a cover story of Vatican complicity in recovering a coagulated oil slick.
On the way to 0°lat-0°long, Van Horne rescues shipwrecked 41-year-old CASSIE FOWLER: rationalist, feminist, underappreciated playwright, and member of the Central Park West Enlightenment League. When they finally encounter the corpus dei -- two miles long, fully human and male, and without a scratch -- Cassie immediately realizes the threat it poses: fundamentalist and patriarchial forces would use it to reverse all the gains made by rationalists and feminists. She convinces the female radio operator to send a coded message to her boyfriend, OLIVER SHOSTAK, chairman of the League, dilettante artist and heir to a condom fortune. The League quickly makes plans to neutralize the threat, hiring Pembroke and Flume's World War Two Reenactment Society to stage a recreation of the Battle of Midway, with the corpse standing in for the carrier Akagi. The cover story: it's a Japanese genetic-engineering project, a golem designed to compensate for Asian height inferiority.
Back in the Atlantic, the Valparaíso attaches its retrofitted tow chains to the Corpse's ear bones and makes way. Extended exposure to the body -- the Idea of the Corpse, Ockham dubs it --and the stress of killing scavenging wildlife, begins to erode the moral bulwarks of the crew. "No one is watching," the feeling goes; and even Ockham and Mirriam find themselves dancing naked in God's navel. When the ship strands itself on a suddenly-resurfaced uncharted island (the body acting as a chaotic attractor), the bulk of the crew deserts to engage in a bacchanalian orgy of bloodsports, gluttony and lust amid the godless sculpture of the once-drowned city.
Ockham, Van Horne and his genius cook defeat starvation and bring back the prodigal crew with food made from the Divine body -- a drastic contingency the Jesuit is desperate to rationalize. They dig the ship out and exit the radio-blocking storm around the island, to receive panicked Vatican communiqués. The plan has changed, they're told; it's too late to save God's brain, so a second supertanker has been filled with formaldehyde to preserve it. Van Horne isn't about to abandon his mission, however, and the race to the Arctic is on. Pembroke and Flume et al are waiting, though, with the Enterprise icing over and Shostak forced to pay for faux-USO entertainments. When the Valparaíso finally arrives, they attack with TBD-1 Devastator torpedo planes and SBD-2 Dauntless dive bombers. When the "golem" fails to sink, they turn their sights on the tanker itself --oblivious to Shostak's pleas that this is no longer a game and his girlfriend is on that ship! No, it's not a game -- because DiLuca steams over the horizon with the heavily-armed Persian Gulf tanker Maracaibo, Van Horne's estranged father CHRISTOPHER VAN HORNE at the helm. Nonetheless inflamed that his son is being attacked, he opens fire on the planes, heedless of the body; he's been told it's a prop for a pornographic movie. DiLuca's real mission is to burn the corpus dei; news of its existence could destroy society, as the Valparaíso mutiny evidenced.
People die. Ships sink. Van Horne transfers his flag, almost manages to make peace with his father (as promised by the angel RAPHAEL, back in New York), and completes his mission. When they encounter the dying angel MICHAEL, Ockham receives a last datum: God never asked to be buried. The Jesuit figures He meant his corpse to be seen; the ultimate duty of a father is to step aside for his children. Then Van Horne and Fowler get married, sell his logbook as a work of fiction, and have a kid. Then the sequel happens.
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