"This Good Book" by Iain Hood

Matthias Grünewald, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

A beautifully written book about art and religion; it was also very funny.

 Susan Alison wants to paint the most perfect Crucifixion and when she encounters fellow art student Douglas she realises she has to have her as her Christ. He models for her over the next fourteen years, as the pair of them try different poses, different perspectives and different techniques. Meanwhile his career as a conceptual artist - he exhibits bags of his urine - progresses by leaps and bounds. 

I thought this was an incredible book. In one sense it is about the platonic but deeply loving  relationship between these two young people, but which reminded me of that in One Day by David Nicholls. But it is also about different understandings of God and Jesus, asking questions like: exactly how much did Jesus love his mother? and how does God experience the passage of time? There were moments when I wondered whether Douglas, a child prodigy in a number of fields, was supposed to represent Jesus. Susan Alison has quasi-epileptic 'absences' in which she says things that later seem to foretell the future so she must be some sort of prophet? But mostly it is about art and the varieties of art and the price that has to be paid for art.

I'm not sure I have ever experienced a book that was so immersed in visual art. Right from the first page when the narrator, Susan Alison, catches a glimpse of the belly of Douglas and reflects: "His flesh was yellow ochre and burnt siena and raw umber and there was a halo of pale blue-white fluorescent light around his head and shoulders. The light around him in the darkness of the hallway formed a circle, and the door frame formed a square. He moved his legs into an isoceles of reflected light from the fake while and blue diamond tile linoleum floor. Eight heads high. The perfection of the proportion of him. The luminousness of him." (Ch 1) Susan Alison and Douglas have repeated discussions about art. We are in the mind of Susan Alison every step of the twisted way as she explores the terrain in which she will create her masterpiece. This is art, art, art; the only comparable books in which art is so foregrounded that I can think of are My Name is Asher Lev (which is also about a painting of the Crucifixion) and its sequel The Gift of Asher Lev by Chain Potok. My novel Bally and Bro is also about an artist. 

TGB alludes repeatedly to paintings of the crucifixion, for example: "Matthias Grunewald's lip-smacking relish at twisted the emaciated body of Christ as he tortures the paint and makes Christ bleed near-solid gobbets of blood. Or Nikolai Ge's hideously terrifying and terrified Christ screaming at the top of his lungs to the sky and a God who cannot be there as his bedraggled rags soak with blood-red paint." (Ch 1) Fabulous descriptions which made me long to see these paintings: I have subsequently found many of them on the internet.

The first-person narrative voice, very Scottish and full of colloquialisms, is very strong in this novel and both the principal characters are fully realised in all their complexities; the narrator's stereotyping of Douglas is repeatedly confounded. The plot is perfectly paced (there's a huge climax almost exactly at the 75% turning point), and nicely twisted towards the end, and it was not till about 60% that I had my first hint of how the book might end. There's a surprising amount of humour, mostly around the idea of Douglas as a "don't say 'piss artist' because everybody says that." (Ch 2) There's also a lot of profound thinking about both art and religion. And the descriptive prose (such as in the paragraph above) is sometimes breath-taking.

Selected quotes:

• "Like all good Christians, she wanted good paintings of suffering and torture and death and rape and incest and child sacrifice and bestiality. Good Bible stories. Good paintings." (Ch 1)
• "Jesus needed to be beautiful, because if he's not beautiful then what is he? Jesus as God had to be the most beautiful man and the perfection of man, because if he's not that then what is he?" (Ch 2)
• "What else? Oh yes, he could drive and had a car. I know! Who would have thought?" (Ch 3)
• "Can you make your jokes funny so that I can identify them." (Ch 3)
• "Genuine is better than authentic." (Ch 6)
• "He was peeing into bags to pay for those meals. Scotland's shame!" (Ch 7)
• "The biggest arse that ever came off the arsehole production line." (Ch 8)
• "Like throughout history, all that the art owned by the Church proved is that it was the Church that had stolen the money from the peasants to pay for the bloody art." (Ch 9)
• "A turbulent mess of fleshy waves that was yellow ochre and burnt siena and raw umber and blackened blue and sickly , yellowing white and blood vermillion." (Ch 10)
• "The first failure of art is to not name a piece Untitled, because to need to title it means that the image or sculpture or installation or whatever it is cannot explain itself.  ... it's like a kid making a line drawing and then writing underneath it 'A DOG'." (Ch 14) I always think this is true when a poet at a poetry reading tells you what their poem is about before they read it: if you need to do that, it isn't good enough. I also felt this very strongly when looking at the Turner Prize entrants at the Towner Gallery in 2023 - 2024; in some cases (mostly downstairs) I would never have guessed what the artist intended without the text telling me. And that to me means that the artwork has failed. 
• "The two great traditions in crucifixion paintings: humiliation and exaltation." (Ch 14)

This superb book worked for me on every possible level. A strong narrative voice, a great plot, a deep relationship between two utterly believable characters and a great deal of food for thought. Six stars out of five! June 2024; 200 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God