osprey_archer | Book Review: The Inconvenient God

When the decommissioner from the Ministry of Divinity arrives at Nando University, she expects to perform a routine commission for the resident minor trickster god, Ohin. The Ministry - in the interest of tidiness, one presumes, also signified by the ministry’s push away from named deities toward Abstractions - regularly decommissions minor gods as they are forgotten and wane in strength.

But Ohin is not waning in strength; not a forgotten god at all. He’s not even a god, exactly, but an apotheosis, a mortal who has been elevated to minor godhood for… well, for any number of possible reasons. And without knowing which one it is, the decommissioner can't retire Ohin.

I would go on, but part of the pleasure of Francesca Forrest’s The Inconvenient God is watching the way that this seemingly simple task unfolds a fractal series of complications: complications with their own little mini-complications furling off them, like twigs from the branch of a tree. The story isn’t a mystery in the traditional sense - not a whodunnit, or even a how did they do it? - but there is nonetheless a mystery to unfold: what’s up with Ohin, and how can we sort out this mess?

I’m hoping there will be more stories in this setting. (A pause here to gaze hopefully at

asakiyume.) The combination of bureaucracy with the genuinely numinous divinity creates an intriguing conflict, and the world-building is sketched in just enough to suggest all sorts of questions that further stories could explore. What happens if you just leave old fading gods lying around rather than decommissioning them? And what will be the consequences of this push toward Abstraction rather than personified divinity?

Maybe the ministry is hoping that Abstractions, unlike personal gods, will be less likely to throw a spanner in the bureaucratic works by having idiosyncratic opinions. What’s it like to meet an Abstraction, anyway?