The Blasphemer

The Blasphemer is a novel by the English writer Nigel Farndale, published in 2010. It sets a contemporary story and a story from the First World War beside one another and looks at what the two men have in common.

Daniel Kennedy is a zoologist of a thoroughly rational cast of mind, an atheist who has built his life on the assumption that questions have answers. The crash at sea puts him in a position where the only options are both terrible, and while he is dealing with what he did during it he is also trying to account for something he believes he saw in the water while he was swimming for help, which is not the sort of thing his working philosophy accommodates.

Running alongside that is the story of his great-grandfather Andrew, who is waiting to take part in the Passchendaele offensive in 1917 and who will also have to live with the consequences of a choice. The novel moves between the two of them and presses the question that neither can avoid: whether love is conditional, whether the past has to be paid for, and what can be done about it afterwards.