'Towing Jehovah' - Book Review

This is a hard book to find. It came highly recommended by a couple friends, but it's not a common book: eventually I borrowed it from one of the friends. Towing Jehovah is by James Morrow, and was published in 1994. I've filed it under my "Fantasy" category, although that's a bit of a stretch. But "Science Fiction" wasn't any better - and it did win a World Fantasy Award. It's set in the modern day world, but God has died and his two mile long corpse has landed in the mid Atlantic. And the archangel Raphael is hiring the disgraced captain of the Exxon Valdez (actually called the "Carpco Valparaiso" in the book, but the story is essentially the same) to pilot the Valdez to retrieve the corpse and inter it in the Arctic where it won't rot. I'm not giving anything away here - this is all revealed in the first ten pages.

The book is generally considered to be a satire - considering the subject matter, you're probably not surprised. One quote mentioned over at Wikipedia struck me as particularly sound: "What makes this novel so buoyant and, ultimately, a little disappointing, is that Morrow doesn't care as much [as Vonnegut]" (the Los Angeles Times). The book is a farce, but the quote struck home because Vonnegut could make a farce carry a significant amount of weight: Morrow doesn't really manage that. He's a good writer though, and it's a funny and interesting read.