When the Professor Got Stuck in the Snow
Dan Rhodes
You will not have read this book and you are unlikely to have seen it in any bookshop. This is because the main character is a grotesquely arrogant, pompous, rude, and spiteful thrice-married evolutionary biologist who goes by the name of Professor Richard Dawkins. He is a fanatical atheist and the author of several famous books, including The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion, just in case you didn’t pick up the allusion. For some reason publishers took fright and turned down the opportunity of publishing it.
Initially Rhodes published the book himself in a privately-printed edition of only 400 copies. Those who saw it, liked it. Rhodes pursued Dawkins, asking for a promise that he wouldn’t sue, on the grounds that the Professor says he defends free speech (and Rhodes has no money). No such promise was forthcoming, in spite of a few good nudges in the book itself (“the Professor was a man of many mottoes, one of which was ‘Investigation, not litigation’.”) Eventually, however, a small publisher by name of Aadvark Bureau dared to go where mightier publishing houses feared to tread and brought out a paperback edition of the book. Again, those who saw it, liked it though it has yet to be reviewed widely.
The book is not obviously high art. Indeed, it is relentlessly and enjoyably silly, Carry On up the Cotswolds in literary form, as the esteemed professor and his adoring and sycophantic male secretary Smee try to reach Upper Bottom, so that he might deliver a lecture to the Women’s Institute there. “I have women to speak to tomorrow afternoon”, the Professor declares, “many of whom will be deluded churchgoers who urgently need to hear the truth about religion from somebody who has done all the experiments.”
Alas, their journey is interrupted by snow and this odd couple is forced to accept the hospitality of a local vicar and his wife. The ensuing comedy results from that classic staple of ‘differences in collision’. Dawkins’ self-regarding and unconstrained zeal collides violently with gentle but perplexed politeness of his Christian hosts and their friends, the whole farce being spiced up with a series of unlikely comic moments.
The plot twists, most obviously at the end, and is at times laugh-out-loud funny. However, its real joy comes in the way that Rhodes captures the register that Dawkins had made his own. “They are only being kind in the hope that God sees them and gives them a pat on the back for it when they get to heaven,” he roars at Smee. “True kindness can only come from Humanists such as myself, we who know that there is nothing waiting for us when we die.”
This is in itself a variation of the ‘differences in collision’ device but one that lifts the book above mere slapstick. What would the world be like, the books seems to ask, if Dawkins and atheist warriors like him were actually like their public persona? (The real Dawkins, by all accounts, is not.) What would it be like if the rhetoric was real?
Dawkins once remarked in a discussion on his website that atheists should “abandon the irremediably religious” precisely because they were irremediable and concentrate instead on the “fence-sitters… [who] are likely to be swayed by a display of naked contempt. Nobody likes to be laughed at. Nobody wants to be the butt of contempt.”
Rhodes lifts this sentiment almost word for word – “one cannot beat ridicule and mockery for making somebody come around to one’s point of view” – and then puts it into vigorous action. “Wonderful,” the professor crows after his hosts say grace, “Who needs a time machine with you two around? You do realise, don’t you, that you might as well have been speaking to a goblin with a purple face.” “Science is… everything,” he tells Mrs Potter, “and if you are so blinkered, and so dull-witted that you cannot even muster a keen interest in it, then quite frankly you should never have been born.” “I hope that you do not mistake my frankness for lack of compassion,” he says later. “I am here to help you…to open those eyes of yours to the absurdity of your religion.”
The result is instructive, its implications going beyond the Professor’s own malevolence. The fact that the recent New Atheist spasm coincided with the explosion of Web 2.0 proved both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, it enabled an unprecedentedly rapid spread of ideas and opinions among the techno-literate of the world; on the other, it allowed for a pretty brutal rift in discourse, between everyday courtesy and on-line venom. This is nothing new: pamphleteers of the past could be savagely nasty in print and winsome in the flesh. But the ubiquity of web-comment and the legions of atheist trolls (and their religious counterparts) has made the split all more obvious and unpleasant.
In amongst the knockabout fun and piercing one-liners, When the Professor Got Stuck in the Snow re-embeds the polemical in the personal. Not simply about the collision of zeal and reasonableness, of ideology and humanity, of egocentrism and hospitality, it is also about the chasm between public and private intercourse, one that seems today wider than ever before.
Nick Spencer is Research Director at Theos | @theosnick
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