Reading Nigel Farndale's The Blasphemer is like being on a boat on a choppy sea; you never quite know when the next wave will hit, how great the pitch and toss will be, and how soaked with salt spray you'll become as a result. Yes, there's an occasional passage where the narrative wind drops suddenly and you're momentarily becalmed, but as a whole it makes for an exhilarating ride, though not - it must be said - an even, balanced one.
This is a very ambitious novel which I found extremely interesting. Its themes are conditional love, cowardice, familial/genetic traits, spiritual belief, and they are worked out through parallel stories, one set in the present day when a zoologist on his way to the Galápagos Islands survives a plane crash, the other during the First World War when his great-grandfather 'dies' at Passchendaele. Both strands are complex and bring in many fascinating ideas, some of which get their exposition and resolution of sorts as the book goes on, while others are left hanging. So we have a cameo appearance by Vaughan Williams and a missing fragment of Mahler, militant atheists and men of faith, string theory and Bach, angels and (shall I say demons?) a marvellously awful villain, Wetherby, the professor of music. As such I found it very gripping, but my intellecual curiosity was piqued and not always satisfied, and there was a juvenility about the main character - the zoologist Daniel Kennedy - which made him less convincing than he might have been (and his 'wife' is deeply unappealing - reader empathy is sorely tested there).
If you don't mind a buffetting, there's a lot to think about here, but it's not just the Flanders Tommies who go over the top, the plot is ... exuberantly over-elaborate. Nonetheless, I found it an absolute page-turner.
