Religions and their holy books provide the underpinning to laws and societal norms all around the globe, but the ideals they lay out for living often bear too little relation to the realities of our lives. Michael Arditti has explored this for the past quarter century in acclaimed and award-winning novels such as Easter, The Enemy of the Good and The Breath of Night – often a lone voice in a genre that used to be crowded with the likes of Graham Greene, Muriel Spark and Evelyn Waugh.
Of Men and Angels is his longest and most ambitious work of fiction yet, extending over five historical periods, from the earliest days of the Old Testament through to 1990s Los Angeles – so-called “city of angels”. It is angels – bewinged creatures, half-human, half-spirit, and found in many religions, where they act as guardians, messengers and intermediaries with distant deities – who begin and end the book, and stitch the story together.
It all centres on a single biblical incident: the fire and brimstone rained down by angels, on God’s order, on the city of Sodom in the Book of Genesis. Only Lot and his daughters are spared the destruction, while his wife – who ignores the angels’ instruction not to look back as she leaves the city – is cruelly turned into a pillar of salt.
Christianity has long argued that the fate of Sodom, and its neighbouring city Gomorrah, was the result of its inhabitants “embracing” homosexuality. Hence, in that curious churchy language of condemnation, same-sex attraction is “the sin of Sodom”.
What Arditti explores is how three millennia of homophobia has been based on reading motivations into the Genesis text that are, at best, opaque. The “sin of Sodom”, according to the words used in the Authorised Version of the Bible, is just as likely to have been an absence of hospitality, over-attachment to other deities, or lack of trust in God. And what, he asks, of the passage that follows in Genesis where Lot’s two daughters ply their father with wine and sleep with him to propagate the race? That is rarely mentioned in pulpits.
Of Men and Angels, then, is a novel about religious hypocrisy. Each of the five sections of the book tells the story of its victims. In the first, a young scribe, Jared, exiled with his fellow Jews to Babylon in the sixth century BC, is entrusted with creating new written versions of the Genesis stories after the originals have been lost in the aftermath of battle. He struggles to reconcile the teaching of Judaism on the sin of Sodom with his private exploration of a more tolerant attitude to human love in the city in which he is held captive.
Then there is Simon Muskham, in 15th-century York, whose faith leads him to take part enthusiastically in a re-enactment of Lot’s escape from Sodom as part of the city’s mystery plays, but who is emboldened to see his same-sex attraction as a gift from God, an act of heresy that costs him dear at the hands of the church authorities. And finally, there is Frank Archer, a Rock Hudson-esque Hollywood star in the early 1990s, who has hidden his sexuality for decades but, when terminally ill with Aids, embarks on a final film, a reworking of the tale of Sodom.
It could so easily feel fragmented, repetitive, or didactic, but Arditti is a master storyteller who uses his theological literacy sparingly to deliver a challenging but enthralling read.
Peter Stanford’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Faith is published by Hodder.
• Of Men and Angels by Michael Arditti is published by Arcadia (£16.99). To order a copy for £14.44 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
