Richard Ferrer is the editor of the Jewish News and his debut novel begins with Chris Deckers (the surname is the first of several in-jokes for his paper’s readers) walking confidently up to the bimah to celebrate his barmitzvah.
Except he doesn’t.
Instead, Deckers keeps on walking, out of the synagogue, and into his future.
His father, Ferrer tells us, has already tried to soothe his restless son’s religious disquiet telling him after each unsatisfactory RE lesson to “play along, it’s harmless”. But Deckers’ conviction in the pointlessness of the Almighty stays with him into adulthood.
When we next meet him he and his wife Lucy are professors and chief innovation officers for a 17th generation AI project called ABRAHAM.
On September 1, 2039, the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the Second World War, Chris and Lucy are about to receive a series of updates from ABRAHAM, covering the latest innovations across the fields of medicine, genetics and AI. These are all in response to previous questions from the Deckers, asking for progress reports.
And there, tucked away in ABRAHAM’s responses, are the fateful four words: “There is no God.”
At which point the novel turns into a sort of Wacky Races, featuring murder, fake and real villains, violence, and imaginable and unimaginable consequences.
Ferrer has great fun in laying out what “Losing My Religion” could mean to the world. Synagogues, mosques and churches close across the globe, riots break out and “Vatican City is turned into Disneyland.” Thousands of religious leaders no longer have work and the BBC cancels Songs of Praise.
Along the way there are sex jokes, some terrible puns (though I did laugh), a couple of sideswipes at a (fictional) chief rabbi, and a bit of Ferrer hedging his bets.
Because even if Deckers and ABRAHAM are right and God is an artificial construct created by Sumerian elders called Gilead, Obadiah and David, the novel also allows for the possibility of belief.
Ferrer has thrown everything but the kitchen sink into Error 404, a fresh and funny look at the wars of science versus religion.
And he even allows the teenage Deckers to recite his Torah portion, albeit in front of a baying crowd of family and friends, instead of inside a synagogue.
Error 404, by Richard Ferrer, is published by The Book Guild
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