by Lee Baker

Good to Be God is refreshing. A book that has got things to say about morality, and how we should live, without any hand-wringing, and with jokes!
The novel is not for those craving realism; nor those wanting “a treatise” as the author, Tibor Fischer, puts it, on a serious topic – a rarity, given that so many contemporary novels concern themselves with putting the world to rights. The premise is that the forty-something hero, Tyndale, is disappointed with life and decides to re-invent himself by moving to Miami and attempting to convince everybody that he is, contrary to all appearances, God. However, the novel does not deliver exactly what it says on the tin.

The narrator and the author, get carried away with the (mostly very good) comic set-pieces, involving farcical sermonising, and ludicrous gangsterism. The reader will be carried along, too – as long as you do not expect a straightforward quest-narrative along the lines of Harry Potter – given the narrator’s often wry take on life. Civilisation, for Tyndale, is “a pretence we’re better than we are,” what is interesting about children, unlike adults, is “they believe” in what appears to be impossible; and “not caring about your problems is almost as good as not having them”. But, at times, his expressions of dissatisfaction with life wear a little thin, his anger at having to wait in a queue, his gripes over having to pay his taxes. He is not exactly a likeable man. But, perhaps, that is the point.

Tyndale is pulling off a con trick that he is somebody else. For Fischer, this is akin to the task of a novelist, persuading everybody that a lie is ‘true’. While Tyndale’s adventures stretch plausibility to the limit, he seems real enough himself, and we very much want this everyman to succeed in transforming his sorry life. He completes a journey, of sorts, an endlessly digressive journey, to be sure, but one that leads him to sift through various ways of living.

Tyndale tries being “uni-directional” – a kind of Nietzschean overcoming – he flirts with blind faith, the belief of children, and tries out a kind of instrumentalist morality, all rejected in the end, the latter for being merely “kindness as a career move”. None of this, despite the one reviewer likening Fischer to Iris Murdoch, is didactic, or even very noticeable. These thoughts on morality are slipped in to a book that would appeal to many an everyman. A surprisingly wise book, then, and also one that has plenty of crass humour, which is used to attack systematic morality: “If I had ten seconds to transmit only one important universal truth, as my message to mankind? Most cats don’t like to be microwaved.”

A book that, to quote Tyndale, portrays life as “ a battle to conceal,” our failures, our mortality; an antidote to life and literature as the suffering of “an overdose of reality”. I particularly liked the moment when Tyndale is unable to scoop out some rock-solid icecream, a nice symbol of recalcitrant reality, which leaves him, powerless, as an abject “attendee at an unfortunateness”.

Good to be God is available to buy now, published by Alma Books for £7.99

To read Lee’s interview with Tibor Fischer please click here.