RAINGOD

I’ve written before that the best portrait in literature of high-functioning autism is Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes*. I may have been wrong. I think I’ve found a better one in another book; actually, in the book – it’s God.

            Think about it. He’s bright, brilliant and creative. When we first meet him he’s so obsessed with his current project that he works for six solid days before collapsing on the seventh.

            He’s enigmatic. Although he can be great company when he wants to be, often he’s just hard to get along with. He invents bizarre little rituals that he insists everybody around him follow. Failure to do so results in fearsome tantrums – either he melts down and destroys everything in sight, or shuts down and doesn’t say a word for centuries on end.

            Nobody’s ever quite sure what sets him off.

            It’s not that he doesn’t want to interact with people. In fact, he craves it. He’s desperate to love and be loved; he’s just not sure how. Try as he might, it always goes subtly, horribly wrong. He’s convinced he’s always perfectly reasonable – why don’t these people get him?

            The problem is he empathises better if he’s actually been in the other person’s shoes. Thankfully he’s blessed with the ability to think in unusual ways, and to stubbornly apply himself to a problem until it’s solved. So, after a couple of thousand years mulling it over, the answer dawns: You want to get along with humans? Then, be a human.

            Applying that gift for lateral thinking again, he not only gets around the need for sex in conception, but also becomes his own father (let’s see you do that).

            As you might expect, he’s a strange, serious child. He causes his parents no end of worry – vanishing on a trip to the city, only to turn up lecturing people at the Temple steps.

            The familiar pattern continues into manhood. Some love him; others hate him; few are indifferent to him; nobody gets him: is he really this way, or is he taking the piss? Was that a joke? Why does he talk for so long, and so impenetrably? What the hell does he mean? And where does he get to when he disappears for hours or days at a time?

One thing’s for sure: he has an idea of himself, and he takes it very seriously. So seriously that it gets him killed. He doesn’t deal well with authority – civil or religious.

Since his little sojourn among us he’s mellowed a bit. No more smiting. He still engages in interminable monologues on ideas he finds interesting; but he generally limits himself to speaking at people nearly as odd as he is himself.

And still, nobody can agree on exactly what he’s saying.

No Sherlock Holmes, but it’s a compelling portrait, eh? Precisely what questions it answers regarding a Creator – benevolent, omniscient, absent or otherwise – I can’t really say.

But it might just tell us something about the guys who wrote the book ....

*The Diogenes Club, 30 August 2012