Boyd has an exceptional ability to tell a really compelling story, in dense, imaginative detail, about characters endowed with complex, and convincing, emotional lives. This is no mean achievement. What Boyd offers us this time is one creative tour de force enshrined inside another: not merely the fictional life of Logan Mountstuart, minor novelist, art fancier, man-about-town and wartime intelligence agent, but this fiction presented as Mountstuart's bona fide journals, complete with lacunae, editorial notes and linking passages, and a remarkably thorough index.

Boyd takes tremendous risks in making this not over-talented, ambitious sensualist draw so full and unflattering a portrait of himself. That he succeeds so triumphantly is chiefly a tribute to the never-failing realism of his historical ghost-raising, the rich and loving detail with which he invests each fresh scene and character, the pitch-perfect ear with which he catches the musings, not only of Logan himself but also of his friends and relatives, at each successive stage of their lives. And for this, as the Grossmith brothers proved with the classic "The Diary of a Nobody," your protagonist doesn't need to be clever or dominating, let alone nice. What Boyd has created is a seedy, sexually grubby, literary Everyman to carry the shabby banner of the last century's British upper-middle classes. I've already read this book twice and probably shall again. Of how many novels can that be said?

Peter Green

*

The Book Against God, A Novel; James Wood; Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 258 pp., $24

On the scene but not a literary personality, writing with passionate intelligence and richly metaphorical style, James Wood has ignored the opaque aridity of literary theory and insisted on the human relevance of classic and modern literature. Wood set forth his aesthetic and religious principles in his first book, "The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief" (1999). The big gun in Wood's critical armory is theology. The autobiographical sections of "The Broken Estate" set out ideas he develops in his novel. He asserts that our religious belief was broken in the mid-19th century, when "the supposition that religion was a set of divine truth-claims, and that the Gospel narratives were supernatural reports" began to collapse; when "historical biblical criticism began to treat the Bible as if it were a biography or even a novel." A key argument in both his criticism and his novel is that there is no correspondence between religion and morality, that "God-fearing Europe ... does not seem to have been obviously more moral than God-questioning Europe" after Voltaire and Hume. The hero of Wood's novel, who thinks the Bible is merely a collection of myths and that religion does not improve human behavior, wrestles with the consequences of abandoning religious belief. The witty, serious and intelligent "The Book Against God," its theological meaning cradled in the arguments of "The Broken Estate," matches Wood's high critical standards.