HOME | ABOUT | FICTION | INTERVIEWS | FEATURES | REVIEWS | NEWS | BUY THE PRINT MAGAZINE | BACK ISSUES | LINKS | CONTACT US

Ken Russell
Mike and Gaby’s Space Gospel
Warner Books, paperback, 207 pages, £6.99
Review by David Clark (2000)

This is a surprise. I don’t think Ken Russell’s written a novel before (this is supposed to be the first, but that doesn’t really prove anything), and the veteran filmmaker (this might have been a film if he could have raised the money) has turned in a ‛work of comic science fiction’. Don’t be fooled though, because Mike and Gaby’s Space Gospel doesn’t resemble something by Robert Rankin. The plot may involve robot aliens creating mankind, and there’s no shortage of jokes, but the book is intelligent and engaging.

Re those jokes: Adam and Eve here are named after two alien pot plants. The five thousand are fed smoked salmon bagels, and complain about the lack of cream cheese. A bit feeble, then, though no worse than you’d expect in a film.

There’s more blasphemy (of the unshocking kind) in store. Mike and Gaby’s (the alien robots I mentioned) mad experiment involves their creation, Jesus, whose miracles are rigged up by them. Satan is an alien enemy, and wants to spoil the experiment. The Star of Bethlehem is – you guessed it – a spaceship.

So this is not the most original of SF novels (though Russell may think that it is) and with its (perhaps predictably) sympathetic Jesus displaying great integrity, it isn’t really outrageous at all. Not for most of us, anyway. It can be funny – Mae West, anyone? Having to write this is a novel may have provoked Russell into indulging in fantasy casting, and the book is none the worse for it. I suppose Mike and Gaby’s Space Gospel probably is quite funny, if you like this kind of thing – SF humour, particularly of the Douglas Adams variety, has been a blind spot for me since the age of about 12. Those who adore Adams might well like Space Gospel, though, and I’ll take Ken Russell over Robert Rankin any day.

Mike and Gaby’s Space Gospel shows how far ahead of film the novel is – think of Monty Python’s Life of Brian upsetting the tiresome Christian pro-censorship brigade. And there is a certain amount of sexual humour, at Mary Magdalene’s knocking shop, for instance. As a film, particularly a film by Ken Russell, this would have provoked the moralising Westminster Council to ban it from the West End for sure. It would also, perhaps, have provoked a series of sequels. One film would have been enough for me; though I would rather have seen that film than read the book. •

© 2011 THE EDGE and individual contributors. All rights reserved. All contributors reserve the right to be identified as the authors of all works credited to them on this site. Nothing should be reproduced without permission. THE EDGE magazine was founded in 1990, before anything else of that name or similar. The opinions of individual writers are not necessarily those of the editor.