On the face of it few places in the world could be further apart than Northern Ireland and Papua New Guinea, but in his ambitious third novel Nick Laird bridges the gap with a sprawling investigation into belief and belonging. Liz Donnelly, originally from Ulster, is a US-based anthropologist and specialist in myth. She is on her way to an island off the coast of Papua New Guinea – pointedly named New Ulster – to film a BBC documentary about world religions, but first she stops at her home town of Ballyglass for her sister Alison’s wedding. This is Alison’s second marriage: having divorced an abusive alcoholic, she has now settled for a nice if quiet Ulsterman she met through her local Presbyterian church.
Through Liz, Laird brings an anthropologist’s eye to his observation of “the lost tribe of Ulster Protestants” and their religious and social myths: “Everywhere imagery of sacrifice and offering, memorials and altars – but even while disguised as just the opposite, a sanctuary from materialism, the church functioned as a marketplace of cold transactions.” Laird’s portrait of a community “steeped in metaphors of hardship and reward” – the Donnelly parents are self-made estate agents, members of the golf and Rotary clubs – neatly sets up the frame of comparison for the Papua New Guinea sections to come. Aghast at the “pointless excess” of Alison’s wedding gifts, Liz reflects that “the kula ring – the exchange system – ruled Ulster life as much as it ruled any Melanesian people”.
And what about the whole question of sectarian violence? On hearing where Liz is headed, her father is concerned about the “trouble” in “these places”. Where exactly are “these places”, she asks, and “what constitutes the foreign?” Does it “depend on distance from Ballyglass”? Her father speaks as if he’s never heard of the Troubles. People who live in glass houses (the town, too, is pointedly named) shouldn’t throw stones. The Donnellys are about to discover that there is plenty of trouble, of both an internecine and hideously intimate kind, right here at home.
It’s all particularly apt because the religion Liz is investigating in New Ulster is a cargo cult. The islanders are Christian, but a charismatic woman called Belef (add a vowel and we have “belief”) is calling for a return to the old gods and promising her followers limitless riches at the coming of an as yet unidentified redeemer. As Liz notes in her documentary voiceovers, the cult, known as the Story, fuses the idealism of the Christian myth with all the entitled materialism of the west. From this point the two paradigms are intertwined, as the novel alternates between Ballyglass and Belef’s jungle.
Belef is a wholly plausible character – canny, stout, middle-aged, and at loggerheads with the smug local missionaries – who is clearly driven by her own demons: she has come up with the Story to try to make sense of the death of her daughter, which the usual Christian platitudes about the will of God can’t adequately explain. Her religion may be founded on the need to solve the insoluble problem of personal suffering and want, but then, the book suggests, aren’t they all?
Laird’s writing in these Papua New Guinean chapters has a grave, melancholy grace. Belef brings out a strain of Conradian mystery in his prose (infused, as in Conrad, with the absurd: she parades in a striped Paul Smith dressing gown and “drives” a rock shaped like a tractor) that perfectly captures our confused yearning to be saved.
As Liz becomes drawn into the cult’s rituals, she reflects poignantly that she “had entered a room – had entered a country – that she did not belong in, and did not understand, and whatever table she had thought she was sitting down to dine at, had been unveiled as an altar”.
This half of the book is, oddly, more convincing than the Northern Irish one. There is an explosive revelation back in Ballyglass when Alison finds out the day after her wedding that her tight-lipped new husband was involved, two decades ago, in an atrocity based on events that took place in Londonderry in 1993. But her resulting soul-searching seems perfunctory; her reluctance to ask any real questions about the past, compared with her sister’s intelligent probing, disappointing.
It’s left to Liz to conclude that though she has spent her whole life “studying the differences, how one tribe does this, another that”, all the time “there was no difference, not really, just tiny variations on a theme of great suffering, great loss”. Laird has given us a richly textured geography of the human need to believe in something, and of the stories, religious and secular, we live by.
• Elizabeth Lowry’s The Bellini Madonna is published by Quercus.
Modern Gods is published by 4th Estate.
