Getting down with God

YOUNG ADULT FICTION: ROBERT DUNBARreviews There Is No DogBy Meg Rosoff Penguin, 243pp. £12.99

TELL A GROUP of teenagers that you are recommending to them a young adult novel in which God is the central character and chances are that not all that many of them will start forming a queue outside the nearest library or bookshop. But add the fact that in this particular case – Meg Rosoff's There Is No Dog– God has been given the mind and body of a dazzlingly handsome boy in his late teens, prone to forthright expression of his apparently insatiable sexual urges, and a degree of interest might be aroused. It is not a premise likely to appeal to all readers, but for those who play along with it there is the opportunity to encounter what must be one of the most original young-adult fictions to have emerged in the 60 or so years since the creation of the genre.

This week’s news that some schools believe it’s too controversial to have Rosoff speak to their students at least means more people will hear about this interesting book.

Bob, as Rosoff’s deity is called, may seem to spend inordinate amounts of time “dreaming of doe-eyed virgins with budding breasts and silky skin ministering unto him with a variety of filthy acts”, but he finds time also, of course, to create the universe. His is a world that may occasionally seem to be “touched with magic”, and Rosoff conveys such moments in prose that is heart-warmingly lyrical. But, as the young man comes increasingly to ask, “Who could have guessed that his wondrous creation would generate so many problems?” These exist on two levels: the generalised manifestations of suffering to be endured by humanity and the more personal traumas to be endured by our cocksure adolescent hero.

In his efforts to address these twin challenges Bob is, allegedly, aided by his flatmate, an older and wiser man known simply as Mr B. The difficulty here, however, is that, entertainingly grumpy as Mr B is, his patience with the arrogant and hormonal youth is gradually evaporating. Trying to ensure that in his master’s creation things do not fall any further apart results in some very humorous banter, not least when Bob, in the guise of one who sometimes bothers to answer a human prayer, responds to a young woman’s plea that she will find someone to love. Readers will guess, correctly, that only trouble lies ahead when Bob himself becomes the boyfriend of Lucy, the girl in question. As in her previous young-adult fiction, Rosoff shows remarkable insight into the far-from-smooth course that young love and young sexuality can take. Little wonder that Lucy eventually reveals herself “a little dazed with the knowledge of exactly how much sex simplifies and complicates everything”.

So there is humour, there is romance and there is sex, but there is much else besides. What, for example, are we to make of Bob’s pet, “an odd penguiny sort of creature” known as an Eck, which, following a sequence of farcical misadventures, will be threatened with being eaten while his boy-deity owner pursues his own amorous concerns? Or what of Mona, Bob’s “fruitcake” mother, not merely a key agent in determining the Eck’s fate but in her alcoholic and poker-playing self a formidable and domineering force in her efforts to influence her wayward son? Characters such as these and the plot developments in which they are entangled give the novel some engagingly surreal moments and reinforce its essentially playful tone.

But such moments and such a tone have to be seen in the context of a narrative that through its concentration on creation and its consequences demands that its readers consider their own existences and purposes on the puzzling planet called Earth.

“Perhaps the way to proceed,” remarks Mr B at one point, “is to think of life on Earth as a colossal joke, a creation of such immense stupidity that the only way to live is to laugh until you think your heart will break.”

These words, with their echoes of Beckett, are addressed to a clergyman friend of Lucy’s mother, Bernard, who had long ago “developed a definite unease about the job God was doing here on Earth” but whose belief in ultimate human perfectibility has helped him to survive the frustrations of his calling. The book’s final line – indeed, its final word – may suggest that Rosoff shares his guarded optimism.

Robert Dunbar is a commentator on children’s literature