Towing Jehovah

God is dead, and the body is floating in the Atlantic: two miles of it, face up, beard streaming, and rapidly attracting sharks. The Vatican has been informed by the angel Raphael, whose kind are dying with him, and requires the corpse towed to an Arctic tomb before the world learns of it. The only man with the qualifications is Anthony Van Horne, a supertanker captain who ran an oil spill onto the Gulf of Mexico and has been unemployable since, and whose penance is to be exactly this errand. His crew of the Valparaíso have their own responses to hauling a deity, most of them appalling. Aboard as a stowaway is Cassie Fowler, a feminist rationalist who considers the corpse the greatest embarrassment atheism has ever suffered and would prefer it destroyed, and her allies have organised an air campaign to that end using vintage bombers. Morrow writes theological farce of the blackest kind, with a shipload of sailors discovering that with the divine visibly deceased, nothing is forbidden. It is genuinely funny, occasionally revolting, and serious about the question underneath: whether morality was ever really propped up by the thing now rotting in the water.