A good God is hard to find

James Francken

• Only Human: A Divine Comedy by Jenny Diski
  Virago, 215 pp, £15.99, October 2000, ISBN 1 86049 839 6

Was God created by a woman, a writer who dreamed up the early stories in the Bible? Differences in vocabulary and style suggest that the Old Testament is a composite of various sources. The oldest sections – parts of Genesis, Exodus and Numbers – are more than three thousand years old and there are commentators who believe that they may have been written by a woman, a highly placed figure in the court of King Solomon. Jenny Diski’s latest novel is a third-person account of misadventure in Genesis: Only Human rattles through the lives of Adam, Cain and Noah and retells the story of Abraham and Sarah. But the omniscient third-person narrative is interrupted; the novel’s central character is God and Diski lets her deity have a point of view. In extended monologues, God looks down on the world, judging the ‘happy, human family’: ‘What sensitivity. What development. What drivel.’ When God talks about himself in the Bible, his sex is ambiguous: metaphors compare him to a mother and a father, a husband and a wife. In Only Human, God is more revealing; by turns patronising, chippy, complacent and withdrawn – God is a man.