Nick Laird’s ‘Modern Gods’ and Restless Protagonists

Nick Laird listens to how we talk and how we think. He enriches what, in other writers’ hands, could well flop as pat story lines. His gifts for phrasing and his skill at shifting narrative voices ground his work. His fiction runs smoothly as it glides over what, on attentive scrutiny, churns up dark depths. He has published three acclaimed, award-winning poetry collections. Modern Gods is the third in his inventive longer portrayals of restless protagonists.

His début novel Utterly Monkey, affably set in the ’80s in Laird’s native County Tyrone and in millennial London, for all of its exuberance and entertainment, seemed too eager for adaptation into a Guy Ritchie romp. Glover’s Mistake in 2009 roamed about the English capital where Laird and his wife, Zadie Smith, first raised their family. Composed with care and wit, Laird’s second novel updates Henry James, Othello, and the film The Apartment. Love’s imperfections, revenge’s joys, and God’s absence allowed chaos to come again to Cool Britannia’s addled hipsters awash in plenty during the boom years of the City.

This new novel may not soothe readers wanting a light read any more than those previous two efforts. Laird’s ambitions and erudition deepen and nourish what, in lesser hands, may have been a pat story line. Having graduated from Cambridge before working six years in a London law firm, Laird adds to fiction his knowledge of how corporate charisma and capitalist machinations ensnare brash social climbers. While Modern Gods leaves the City’s financial heights to enter small-town Northern Irish and BBC media realms, it sustains Laird’s inspection of how aspirants to power get trapped in pain.

Violence shatters an Irish pub as the book begins. “Here was a scatter of archipelagic blood on a ‘Guinness is Good for You’ mirror.” Laird presents a typically elusive image. The pattern of the hegemonic British Isles reflects the divisions exploding into sectarian revenge and stupid death back at the innocents framed, literally, in the midst of their simple celebration. Alison Donnelly must deal with the delayed impact of her market town’s notorious killings, some of the three-thousand-plus “in that province, state, statelet” fallen in the midst of the decades of hatred that marred her childhood. So must her sister, Liz. While Alison grows up near her parents in Ballyglass, Liz aims for academia.

She lands on its more lucrative fringes. Exploiting her study of Claude Levi-Strauss into a somewhat successful self-help manual (Alain De Botton’s How Proust Can Change Your Life comes to mind), chance rewards her again. She’s recruited to step in to host a BBC documentary about a self-styled wonder-worker. This woman’s reputation emanates as exotic enough for the channel to fund a crew.

Belef lives on the clever match to the half-Hibernian, half-British homeland Laird limns. For off Papua New Guinea, the island of New Ulster beckons Liz and her small cabal. Liz’s encounters with both Belef’s cargo cult and the New Truth evangelical missionaries determined to counter its pagan ways with Christian joys dramatize in contemporary stances the sectarian strife of the soil Liz strives to escape. Meanwhile, Alison courts her second spouse, in an alliance reviving raw trauma within the original Ulster. A neat set-up for Laird. However, he stirs up more than two nations’ shadows stalking survivors of tribal loyalties and ideological unrest in our globalizing, television-fueled mono-culture.

For he cannot let his parallel plot take its predicted course to a tidy conclusion. Liz wanders, trapped by the eerie forces surrounding the frail, damp, and moldy shelter in the tropical jungle. She watches the savvy Belef direct doings as she plays to an audience, if a different one than Liz. Belef’s mythic Story, as the anthropologist analyzes and titles it, cannot be contained by stolid theories. Liz gamely speculates.

Then she surrenders to whatever spell Belef and her clandestine cohort manipulates, before BBC cameras. “She tried to emulate the dancers shifted from foot to foot, but in the end she just stood there and bobbed in the traditional Northern Irish manner like a cork or an aunt at a wedding.” Dealing with her wedding and its own media coverage, Alison watches bluetits feeding near her kitchen window. “Flashes of blue and black and yellow, little flurries of peck and displacement.” Like too many in Ballyglass and environs, the birds “seemed to have a freedom she longed for, right now: the power to leave.” Impulses tempt both women towards rash actions and possibly brash decisions.

Uniting disparate characters, “the theme of great suffering, great loss” connects tribes of two places named Ulster. While Laird, in my judgment, pushes in a key interview scene the same fictional creator’s intervention that he applies to a ritual Liz enters not as an observer but as a participant, so that both events feel as if contending for effect, he engages readers. This took me but two long sittings to finish.

Its conclusion refuses the anticipated pay-off or the eschatological revelation soaring above the ken of those eking out humbled lives as they confront modern gods. Laird steps aside rather than hogs his final literary stage. When Liz returns to her Donnelly clan, she “felt as if she hadn’t been anywhere at all.” Whether this represents the fulfillment of her ambition or the correction of her hubris, Laird leaves his audience to puzzle out. Modern Gods veers away from its trajectory, but it lingers askew.