Thank you all for coming along last month – the discussion we had on this book was “lively and vigorous”, which is precisely the sort of discourse we all enjoy.

But I just wanted to share with you my own thoughts, without interruption (I’m looking at you, Janice… I don’t care where, or when, you went to private school… and to be honest with you, I’m still not convinced “Presbyterian” is even a real word…)

Anyway… I’ve taken the time and effort to put pen to paper, and I would appreciate it if you would all read this.

“My Review of The Bible” by Gregor….

This book started off reasonably well – with an old guy who was really into arts and crafts, who got some silly putty and a few other bibs and bobs and apparently built an entire universe. That’s pretty amazing.

But you realise pretty soon that he was clearly a bit daft – because it was only once he was finished that he remembered to turn the fucking lights on…

Then he made a naked dude (fast-drying modelling clay was his oeuvre of choice at this point in his career), and then he made a chick (he had to use some of the modelling clay from the dude, though… I think it might have been a bit late in the evening and the craft shops were all shut or something), and then a snake (more modelling clay, but super-easy to make) and some fruit… and then the narrative sort of gets a bit garbled at this point, but the snake and the chick did something gross with the fruit and the old guy was all like “Get off my lawn. And put some fucking pants on…”

So the chick and the dude had to move out of home, and they had two sons… which was always going to be tough, because neither of them had jobs, and I’m not sure the old dude had invented welfare by that stage…

Anyway, the two sons fought, like brothers do, and it all got a bit out of hand and one of them killed the other one… and the old dude was super-angry about it, and was all like “seriously, all of you… fuck off. go away.”

So the only remaining child of the dude and the chick wandered off into the wilderness… and found a woman, who just happened to turn up so they got married (it’s a bit of a major plot hole… but… well… I can’t explain where she came from. Unless she was his sister. Which, is actually kind of gross now that I think about it…)

And from there, it just becomes one of the most violent books I’ve ever read. Mass killings, enslavement of entire races of people, war after war after war… and then, just when you think you can’t handle any more murder and violence, there’s this weird sexy poetry stuff in the middle for no apparent reason… It’s like 50 Shades of Grey.

Violence, Sex, then Violence… and there’s that endless list of “this guy fucked that girl, who gave birth that other guy, who fucked this other girl…” On and on, it went – like two ageing drunks arguing in a pub over who’d slept with the most women.

And then, there’s this *massive* plot twist that *no-one* saw coming in the second half of the book… it turns out that one of the dudes (spoiler alert) is actually the son of the really violent, embittered and emotionally insecure “omniscient being” from the first half of the book!

And, frankly, I’m amazed that the rest of the book wasn’t about how everyone the new guy met spent hour upon hour telling him “Dude, your dad is being kind of a prick…”

Sure, he tries to explain a lot of it away as “you’ve misinterpreted what he was saying when he said it was cool to kill loads and loads of people”, and “well… Lot’s wife was always pretty salty anyway”, and “okay… look… dad was a bit of a drinker, and sometimes he lost his temper and liked to beat his children”…

So he decides to go all hippy… I’ve seen all the pictures…. the beard, the long hair, the kaftan and the sandles… classic hippy fashion. And then he goes “how about we set up some new rules? You know, nice ones. where “we all get to love one another, as I have loved you” he said, winking knowingly to Matthew and Peter…

Matthew was cool about it all, but Peter got all uptight about it and “denied knowing the new guy three times before the cock crowed” – arguably one of the most laboured metaphors in literary history, if you ask me…

But then it all gets violent again, some Roman dude nails the new guy to a stick, then someone pinches his body for medical experiments or something – then the rest of the people he used to hang out with basically write each other lots of letters about what happened

They called this whole section “the epistles of the apostles” – which would have been a completely awesome name for someone’s critically acclaimed but commercially unsuccessful third solo album in the 1970s, if they hadn’t have used it up 2000 years earlier…

And just when you think it can’t get any weirder, the entire last chapter is clearly someone at the tail end of an acid binge shouting random thoughts into a Dictaphone and forcing their secretary to type it out, word for word, and fax it page by page over to the publisher because they were four months past deadline and no one will get paid if they don’t finish the whole book before church started on Sunday morning…

Overall, I give it one star out of five… just because it would have taken *ages* to write.

It’s really, really long.