FROM his early days as a precocious chief reviewer of The Guardian to his present eminence as the sage of The New Republic in Washington, James Wood has sought the critical high ground. He worries away at big subjects, above all at the meaning for modernity of a widespread loss of religious faith. It can give him, as it gave Arnold and Leavis, a sanctimonious air. When the patterns and problems of belief are displaced from religion to literature, criticism becomes a near-theological quest. Wood’s favoured mode is dogmatic, even prophetic. He relishes books where faith’s modern displacements may most closely be observed.

With The Book Against God, his first novel, he has written one for himself. Its unappetising hero is a failure on several fronts. Professionally, Thomas Bunting has failed to establish an academic career, failed to complete his PhD, failed even to write the advance obituaries commissioned from him by The Times. Privately, he has failed to retain the affection of his wife, failed to live up to his parents’ hopes, failed pretty much altogether to establish a grown-up life. When not telling lies or mooching unhygienically around, he works at his Book Against God, an unwieldy, unending compendium of the atheist creed that has supplanted the Anglican certainties of his happy childhood home.

Soon after September 11, 2001, Wood considered the effect on literature of the terrorist attacks on New York: “It ought to be harder, now, either to bounce around in the false zaniness of hysterical realism or to trudge along in the easy fidelity of social realism. That may allow a space for the aesthetic, for the contemplative, for novels that tell us not ‘how the world works’ but ‘how somebody felt about something’ (these are commonly called novels about human beings).”

His own debut fiction shares some of these restrictive hopes. Social reality, time and place are perfunctorily sketched. The Durham setting of much of the book might as well be Wiltshire or Kent, which is a shame. There’s no zaniness, false or otherwise, and too little of the comedy Wood’s publishers, improbably, instruct us to expect. Instead, there’s a lot of genteel introspection, from some more or less engaging human beings.

Wood has written approvingly of Jane Austen’s combination of character and caricature, which he calls “the essentially satirical, essentially English approach to fictional character”. His own characters, the minor figures especially, are sharply drawn, on much these sorts of lines.

But more than a novel of character, this is a novel of ideas. (These are oddly old-fashioned terms, for an oddly old-fashioned book.) The quality of those ideas fails finally to persuade.

Wood’s background is in significant respects the same as the background he gives Bunting. He has written movingly elsewhere of his own Christian childhood in the northeast of England, and of losing the faith by which his parents were sustained. He has thought quite deeply about these things.

Yet, to the calm conviction of his clergyman father — “if you take God away from the world, the world is no less horrid, no less painful or sinful or unsaved. It is simply painful and sinful without God” — Thomas Bunting responds with little more than adolescent angst, ranting of Kierkegaard and evil and perfectibility and sin. Even by his own unreliable account, he’s a thoroughly annoying young man. His arguments would give few believers pause for thought. And to a more confident atheist than Bunting or Wood, they must seem a waste of time.

Bunting’s inability to make us believe in his Book Against God may be just one more of the myriad failures that have made him what he is. But its consequences, for a novel so utterly bound up with its protagonist’s inner life, are not trivial.

G. K. Chesterton, coming home to a faith he had not suspected was there, writes of “an English yachtsman who slightly miscalculated his course and discovered England under the impression it was a new island in the South Seas”. It’s hard, though, to imagine Wood doing the same. There’s too much invested in Bunting’s crisis of faith.

The 19th-century evangelical wager — unmediated intimacy with God against the terrible loneliness of doubt — is at the heart of Bunting’s difficulties, and perhaps of Wood’s. It was dismissed by John Henry Newman as a one-way bet. A “school of doctrine which intends and professes particular piety, as directing its attention to the heart itself, not to anything external to us . . . is really a specious form of trusting man rather than God”.

That way lies the secularising of the modern mind, the displacement of faith from religion to other spheres. But that way, too, lie books that tell us “how somebody felt about something”, and the grand tradition of critical inquiry in which Wood seems to stand. Where he goes from here is anyone’s guess.

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