God is dead! At least that is the message the Catholic church has told one disgraced ex sea faring captain. His two mile long body has been found floating, supine, in the Atlantic Ocean, and the honour bound privilege of giving the Opus Dei everlasting peace has been placed upon Captain Anthony Van Horne's angst ridden shoulders. It is his duty - should he accept - that the body of God is to be attached to the ULCC Carpco Valaparaíso and interred in an icy tomb in the Arctic ocean. Seems surreal, it truly is. This satirical novel hooked me from the beginning. The sheer audacious notion that God's body should appear exactly where the Prime Meridian meets the Equator is a blasphemous cartographer's wet dream. Attached to this disgraced vessel with its disgraced and newly reappointed captain is a Jesuit priest. He, as well as the captain have both spoken with the dying Archangels who, while in their near death throes, instructed them with their unquenchable pathos and pity to give the once Almighty a decent burial. Both have feathers to prove their encounters. The crew is picked and flying the Vatican colours and flag, the ship makes a beeline for the floating corpse of God. Theology, black humour and the what it means to be an atheist or a believer in the divine are tossed about with reckless abandon within this novel. Along their journey the crew saves one lone survivor from the ocean - a radical feminist - who, when she learns that the body of god, the body of a male god, the body of the mysogynistic and patriarchal deity is discovered, makes it her mission to see that his body never makes it safely to the Arctic.

Sometimes, just sometimes, I felt the author was fluffing some of the ramifications of such a truly monumental discovery behind pretentious religious waffle, and metaphysical atheism. The body of God is discovered and when the clueless crew is informed as to their true mission the novel begins to descend into chaos. Well ordered chaos, but a wonderful examination of what would happen, how would we as a species behave, if we knew that what we did was not being watched. No more Catholic guilt, no more Jewish guilt, no more worries about being moral! Needles to say the entire crew takes the discovery of God's untimely demise poorly. Some more than others, ironically it is the devout who lose what the priest refers to as their "Congenital conscience". Their are some scenes within this novel that are poorly created. The sex scene between the captain and the rescued feminist Nazi, Cassie Fowler, was just off putting. He also injects quite a bit of Latin and German into the novel, and not being a polyglot, I found myself putting down the novel, and looking up the meaning of words and phrases not supplied by my English dictionary. A novel that made me chuckle on occasion, smile wryly at least once a chapter, but in no way made me laugh out loud. Don't expect this novel to have you doubled over in tears or answer questions on eschatological riddles. Enjoy it for what it is.

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