Modern Gods

The wages of sin are death: but the gift of God is eternal life.

Romans 6:23

This was a place of voices, they jostled and contested with one another—a small hard town with one long road leading to a mountain—but even now the sight of sunlight shifting on those distant slopes of bog and rock and gorse made Liz’s heart give a little shiver in her chest. They drove past the agency—Liz could see her father’s receptionist, Trish, standing behind the desk in a white blouse looking into her phone—then through Monrush, smoke rising straight up from a few chimneys on the council houses. And here another voice spoke—a new sign, roughly lettered in red, white, and blue on a sheet of plywood nailed to a telephone pole:

In Texas murder gets you the electric chair. In Magherafelt you get chair of the council.

She gestured up through the windscreen at the sign.

“What’s that about?”

“Oh, that Shinner Declan Keogh. The one who escaped from the Maze. It’s out of date now anyways.”

“How come?”

“Well, he’s now replaced wee Kieran Smith as our ‘local representative’ for Stormont. You know Kieran’s the new MP?”

“That’s right.”

Liz did not know, and when Liz did not know something she had found that “That’s right” was a usefully ambiguous formulation to reply with, particularly in the classroom. But that was in New York.

In Northern Ireland, Stephen said, “What’s right?”

“About the new MP.”

“Yeah … I just said it was. Oh they look after their own. McGuinness handed it on to Smith, and the Unionist was a fella called Barrett. Now Barrett’s father was a caretaker at Springhill. Smith was the main suspect in his killing, they say.”

“I heard that.”

There was a long pause. Stephen shifted into third. They passed the new estates—dozens and dozens of white blocky constructions littering Morgan’s Hill; they’d been erected quickly in the years of madness and entitlement when everyone could buy everything and did. The houses had something childish and optimistic about them as they strained for a little grandeur; flanking each primary-colored front door were thick fluted Doric columns.

“I’ll say this. It’s all one sided in any case. There’s no consultancies coming our way.”

Our way? She wound the window down a few inches and let cool air into the car. There was the lancing smell of slurry. Our way. Our way or the highway. Press-ganged back into the caste, no questions asked. Impossible not to be picked for a side. If you tried to sit on the fence, you came to realize that you couldn’t move, not an inch, for you would topple off and land on one side or the other, covered in bullshit. The north was thesis and antithesis, but no synthesis. It would outlast us all. There was no way round it. What was the word? There was a French word. Uncontournable. There was no getting round it. For sufferance is the badge of all our tribe.

At university she wrote her master’s dissertation on the special kinship groups of Ulster. Her home province was a nightmare of disorder in which she tried to find an order. She became an anthropologist, she told herself and others, because her childhood in that province, state, statelet, made her search for reason in the most unreasonable of places. The work she loved—Lévi-Strauss, Bourdieu, even Foucault—shared the desire to tease new meaning from habituated reality. For how could you live here and not be sad? It was absurd: You didn’t “believe” in something if you were born into it. You accepted it, you acquiesced, you submitted, you lost—and you gave up the chance to become yourself, to come to conclusions of your own. One must be very naive or dishonest to imagine that men choose their beliefs independently of their situation.

“A mess. A complete mess. And that crowd at Stormont, sure they couldn’t organize a piss up in a brewery.”

She pressed the tip of her index finger against the side of the pad of her thumb, shaping from her hand a triangle. She made the other match it, touched the tips of the fingers and thumbs to each other. Were there other triangles in a world of circles and squares? Was everyone a triangle pretending to squarehood or circledom? Who was Andrew McLean? The triangle, the circle, the square? Her hands looked like a mask. She wanted to ask him but didn’t. I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men’s minds without their being aware of the fact.

“True enough.”

They were through the roundabout.

She was almost home and then she was.

And here on the doorstep were her parents: her mother—elegant in black slacks and a caramel cashmere sweater—watering the dripping hanging baskets; and behind her Kenneth, directing, grayer and frailer and smaller than in the memory but now waving with both hands, and pleased to see his daughter. She could see that clearly now, the real pleasure that she brought to them both just by being in their world, at least at first.

As she hugged her mother, Stephen carried her rucksack into the hallway and her father commented on the rain holding off. Then he looked down and said, “Now what in God’s name is that?”

The dog was jumping up at her knees. She stooped and picked her up.

“Atlantic. You remember me telling you about the dog?”

“I do, yes. I didn’t know you were bringing it over.”

“Her.”

Atlantic gave Liz’s ear an explorative lick and Kenneth grimaced.

“I found her on a subway platform.”

Judith said to Stephen, “Will you sit and have a cup of tea? Or coffee? We have a new machine.”

“I really should fly on, actually. I have to be in Tandragree by twelve.” Stephen felt the little extra silence Judith greeted this with, and said, “Maybe a quick coffee.”

“It’s very good of you to go and pick this one up,” Judith continued, to Stephen, who did not disguise in his face the fact that he thought it was good of him too.

“Well, Alison’s off to a fitting there for the dress, isn’t she, and I know you guys have enough to be getting on with.”

“I think we’re almost there,” Judith said.

Kenneth frowned. “I don’t see why your brother couldn’t have—”

“I didn’t ask Spencer,” Liz cut him off. “I mean I texted him and left him a message, but sure he never got back to me.”

Stephen looked from Liz to her father. Already a gloom of mutual resentment was setting in on both their faces.

“The garden looks very well,” Stephen offered, but the thought of the garden only reminded Kenneth of the tent that was destined to destroy his lawn.

“The marquee people were supposed to come tomorrow morning to put it up, but now they say they can’t come till the afternoon.”

“It’ll be fine,” Judith said, throwing Liz a glance. “It’ll all be fine.”

CHAPTER 7 (#ulink_5c5a0adf-d161-5bac-a0c3-66ff74e37e6e)

Liz lugged her rucksack up the stairs, and set it on the bed beside one of her old exercise books. She flicked through it and felt a great rush of sadness. There was such pathos in childish handwriting, especially one’s own. Time had this terrible habit of creeping up and pistol-whipping you on the back of the head. She unzipped her suitcase and decided she couldn’t be bothered to unpack yet. She emptied her pockets of her passport and coins and gum on the vanity unit, where her mother had set a little vase with a head of blue hydrangea from the garden. Behind the vase, propped against the mirror, was a neat row of eight copies of her own book—all signed by her—which Kenneth kept there in case he ever found anyone else to give it to. She lifted the books and set them in the bottom of the built-in wardrobe.

After she received her PhD from King’s College, London, Liz had entered “her slump,” as the family referred to it: two years of trying to get her thesis on Lévi-Strauss accepted by academic publishers, and being rejected for dozens of research fellowships and junior teaching positions, and working in a bar in Clapham, and smoking a great deal of weed. One lunchtime, having woken at noon, she stood in the kitchen, waiting for the kettle to boil, and noticed the letter on the table, a smear of raspberry jam on its corner. Aberystwyth University Press was keen to meet and talk about the thesis, meaning they were interested in bringing it out, and the very next day, a Friday, she traveled at ludicrous expense on two trains and a rail-replacement bus service to see their publisher, Owen Hughes, who was, it turned out, a Lévi-Strauss expert himself. He disagreed about aspects of Liz’s characterization of Lévi-Strauss’s relationship to art, had met Claude, more than once, and had come away with many subtly self-flattering anecdotes from these encounters. Liz perched in a low leather club seat and felt herself sliding lower and lower and lower, until it seemed she looked up at the desk from several feet beneath it. The interview concluded with Liz being asked whether she’d be capable of writing a short guide to either quantum physics or dogs, which was the kind of thing that sold at the moment, and her replying no, not really, no.

For the next month Liz got up and sat in her pajamas and watched daytime television, smoked more weed, and read only magazines, and on a drizzling Wednesday morning woke up knowing instinctively what she had to do. She caught the 34 bus to the Victorian library on Brixton Hill, walked between the rows of computers where recent immigrants typed up their CVs, and found the self-help section. She photocopied the chapter pages and indices of every book that didn’t look obviously stupid or crazy. She found an empty carrel, set up her laptop, and started a spreadsheet in which she collated the main recurring topics, and typed in what Lévi-Strauss had to say about them. And that was the genesis of The Use of Myth: How Lévi-Strauss Can Help Us All Live a Little Better. Whenever she couldn’t find anything relevant in the actual work, she just extrapolated from the circumstances of his life, and soon she had a seventy-thousand-word manuscript that told the story of Lévi-Strauss’s life and work and pontificated cleverly, or cleverly enough, on the usual topics of love, marriage, infidelity, work, ambition, children, parents …

It found a small but respectable publisher, Hawksmoor, within a few weeks. The advance was a modest two thousand pounds, but after a series of interviews, the book began to sell quite well. When it was taken as a Radio 4 Book of the Week, sales accelerated and they went to a fifth reprint. A week after that, the publisher forwarded an e-mail from a producer called Henry Barfoot who was interested in possibly making it a program for BBC Four. Was Liz interested in presenting?

Having taken a few months to write and rewrite, and a few weeks to shoot, and one tortuous day to add voice-over to, when it was finally broadcast at 10:00 p.m. on a Wednesday evening the Times heralded the hour-long show, The Use of Myth, as “fairly informative,” the Guardian trumpeted it as “standard BBC Four fare,” and the Telegraph lauded Liz’s presenting as “adequate, if a little stiff.” Judith had half of Ballyglass watching and was in tears on the message she left on Liz’s answerphone, telling her how proud she was. She’d even coaxed Kenneth into leaving a bluff “Well done.”

She had been writing the follow-up—attempting to do the same with Margaret Mead—for the last seven years. The book seemed to expand in every direction as she got more and more and also less and less interested in her, reading volume after volume of published work, then diaries and letters, and taking notes and underlining and stockpiling the timeline with anecdote and incident. The work had grown monstrous. She’d stopped actually putting words on the virtual page when the word count had hit 321,123, though her reasons for halting there were random and inscrutable to herself and seemed to be based solely on the palindromic, magical nature of the figure. That had happened several months ago, as she sat marking essays in the Moonlight Diner on Tenth Avenue. Now just seeing the file on her desktop gave her a singular feeling of dull terror. She was currently managing to look at the manuscript for a few minutes every couple of days before getting bored, or panicking, or getting bored of panicking. She’d follow the thread of her inattention through a maze of hyperlinks, and two hours later would know slightly more about, say, Hawking or fracking or twerking.