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The Second Coming
- Author: John Niven
- Category: Fiction Commercial
- Publisher: Heinemann (UK)
- Pub date: 7 April 2011
- Length: 304 pages
About The Second Coming
Deeply, intelligently satirical… Niven provides hilarious, perceptive entertainment, not at the expense of religion, but at the expense of bigoted, fundamental zealots
– Henry Sutton, MIRROR
‘GOD‘S COMING – LOOK BUSY!‘
But this time God really is coming, and everyone is trying to look busy. Because God is going to be pissed…
Having left his son in charge God treats himself to a week off around the beginning of the 17th century. He returns to the office to find out that things on earth haven‘t gone quite to plan… A word here about celestial time. Eternity isn‘t totally eternal. It‘s just very, very slow. A day in Heaven passes by at about the same rate as approximately 57 earth years. When He took His week off it was the year 1609 on earth, the height of the Renaissance, which God had been enjoying enormously. When God left, his tackle box under his arm, his fishing-hat perched at a rakish angle, King Lear was being performed for the first time, El Greco was painting The Opening of the Fifth Seal and Galileo was squinting through his prototype telescope, his eyes alighting for the first time on Jupiter‘s four satellite moons.
When He returns from the far-flung countryside of Heaven, it is 2009. As we all know, it has not been an uneventful 400 years… God marches into his secretary‘s office and asks ‘Where is the little bastard?‘ The ‘little bastard‘ is reclining on a beanbag with a white Fender Stratocaster, drinking, catching some rays and trading guitar riffs with his new best friend Jimi. Truth be told JC has been goofing off. Well, he‘d had a pretty rough ride down here.
God calls a meeting of the Saints to assess the situation: the earth has become a human toilet. Genocide. Millions starving. People are obsessed with vacuous celebrity culture ‘and,‘ God points out, ‘there are fucking Christians everywhere.‘ In the end there is only one solution. They‘re sending the kid back…
THE SECOND COMING is an outrageous, irreverent look at faith, religion, modern culture and what might happen to the Son of God if he ever chose to pay Earth another visit…
About the Author
John Niven spent a number of years working as an A&R manager. His first book, MUSIC FROM BIG PINK, a factional novella set in the world around Bob Dylan and the Band in Woodstock in the late 1960s, was critically acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic on publication in 2007. Film rights to the book were acquired by Stephen Butterworth. John now writes screenplays and is currently working on a new novel.