The Plot Against Heaven

Ah the old stories are always best!

I loved this modern take on the timeless tale of the living person who breaks into the after-life. It’s certainly been around since Homer sent Odysseus to visit Hades, so that’s pushing 3 millennia, but I bet it’s much longer than that, actually. What is there after this? Where do dead people go? Aren’t those amongst the questions at the very heart of the human condition?

Kirkbride does it well, and his story manages to be gripping and funny and touching all at once, which is quite a feat. I like the fact that he’s made a modern god, in a modern afterlife, with modern issues. I never could understand why we dress God in a sheet with nothing but endless harp-music, or that Satan is still relying on brimstone and magic. What’s the point of them if the best they can manage is stuff from the dark ages? And if God’s omniscient, he’ll surely have discovered Spotify by now…

The Greeks didn’t have this anachronizing zeal: they dressed their gods in quite the same clothes as they wore themselves and gave them all their own technologies. The same appetites too, and the familiar petty vices. They did not use them for moralising and mystifying, but to tell stories about their own lives and troubles, just as Kirkbride does.

My only criticsm of this so-called book is that its really just a short story – weighing in at only just over 60 pages. Partly I’m disappointed because it finished before I was ready, but also it meant that it lost a lot of opportunities, and had a lot of “rushing through”. At times that worked well – but he could have done a lot more with this story if he’d given himself more space. The world building was started but not finished, the politics of the place were significant, clearly, but largely untold. It’s a rip-roaring yarn (just as Homer’s was) but it’s been done before and the questions aren't going away, so there shouldn’t have been a rush to get it out.

Take your time, next time, Mr Kirkbride.