Blameless in Abaddon
By James Morrow
Harcourt Brace, $24
ISBN 0151886563
Review by Larry Woods
And you thought O.J. Simpson was the trial of the century? In the tradition of Walter Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz, James Morrow has written a dazzling, apocalyptic story, Blameless in Abaddon, which is his second book about the death of God. Morrow has imagined a world where the great Arctic earthquake of 1999 spewed out the comatose body of God, whose two-mile-long body was found floating in the Atlantic. The Catholic church hired supertanker captain Anthony Van Horne to tow the Corpus Dei back to the Arctic, but instead His Comatose Body has wound up in Florida as the main attraction at Orlando's Celestial City U.S.A. and appears to only be unconscious, not dead. Now Martin Candle, a small-town judge in Abaddon Township who has suffered personal calamities, wants to know why God permits harm to the innocent. Candle decides to bring the Corpus Dei before the World Court in the Hague to answer for history's injustices. On a serious level this is religious doctrinal debate at its finest. On an entertainment level, the irony and conflict of this tour through the surrealism of the Creator's dying brain is both awe-inspiring and provocative.
Larry D. Woods, an attorney, is an avid reader of science fiction.
©1996, ProMotion, inc.
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