The premise is straightforward enough - having created the world and everything in it, God keeps an eye on things up until the Renaissance and decides that mankind is doing well enough that He can afford a week's holiday. Returning from His fishing trip - which takes more like 300 years in Earth time - He's dismayed to see the state of the world, with all its wars, pollution, inequality and injustice. And worst of all are all the Christians - none of whom seem to be following His original, single ideal any more: "be nice". So He decides it's time to send His son and messenger back down to Earth for a bit to try and spread the word and just get people to be nicer to each other.
Enter Jesus, the book's main character, who hasn't been up to much since his last trip down here - and he's reluctant to return, after the treatment he got. But eventually he agrees to give it a try, and after being implanted into a virgin in rural America (God likes to do things by the book) he grows up to be a down-and-out musician in New York, helping recovering addicts and the homeless. But he feels that he needs a bigger platform to get his message out there, and by chance - or was it meant to be? - he sees that entering a TV talent show could be the key. It was at this point - having torn through the first third of the book, laughing out loud at regular intervals at its wittiness and inventiveness in depicting heaven and hell - that The Second Coming lost its way a bit for me. Because before the contest itself, we're forced to sit through a road trip across The States, meant to serve as character development for Jesus and his disciples but ultimately failing because none of them, save Jesus himself, had much character to develop in the first place. There's his bandmates Kris and Morgan, respectively the angel and demon on his shoulder, recovering addict Becky who I believe represents the Mary Magdalene figure, Vietnam veteran Bob whose vocabulary has been reduced to a single word thanks to PTSD: there's nothing particularly original to be found, and their trip drags on without really adding anything.
Anyway, I bought this book with the promise of more Steven Stelfox, and fortunately he swoops in around the halfway point to salvage things. He's moved on a lot since the events of Kill Your Friends, now working in LA as the brains behind, and face of, American Pop Star - having become a very thinly-veiled caricature of Simon Cowell and doing very well at it. This leads to some of the more memorable passages as Jesus and Steven clash over Jesus's musical direction (Jesus favours organic indie music, Stelfox knows that that won't sell many records) and the general public start to consider that maybe this scruffy-looking chap claiming to be the legitimate son of God isn't as mad as he first seems. It probably says a lot about me that I liked Steven much more as a character than Jesus - or maybe it's just down to how Niven writes him in such a cleverly multifaceted way, creating a man who is, in theory, pure evil but who you can't help but respect just a little bit. Certainly, I felt as though, were Stelfox to come face to face with the Devil as depicted in this book, he'd stand a pretty good chance of talking his way out of hell.
And so Jesus gets his moment in the spotlight, and it's all he needs to gain a legitimate following, whereupon he moves to Texas to set up a commune. And so I started to lose my enthusiasm for the novel again, somehow caring less about the attempts of local religious figures and then the government to sabotage the potential utopia that Jesus is trying to create, the satirical points that Niven is making here feeling just a bit too obvious and unoriginal. He saves things again with the conclusion and an ending that was actually a lot less cynical than I was expecting, but the ultimate result is a flawed book that I felt missed a lot of potential. And that's without getting into the issues I had with its timeline - it's made clear that God has the power to play around with that kind of thing, but still - and Niven's use of language. I've never had an issue with profanity in a book before but it's so overdone and overused here that it does detract from the prose a lot.
The Second Coming does a lot right, and makes a lot of good points, but there are just a few too many issues for it to be a truly great book. That being said, the world would benefit a lot if everyone would follow Jesus's advice and "be nice" more often.
3/5
Jesus's audition song, and not a bad choice at all.
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