Miracle Workers

Pick it up: If you’re in the mood for humour, if you like satire, if you’d like to read a clever but gentle take on the unique helplessness of human beings.

The premise of this book is that Heaven is a company, and that God is the CEO. Heaven Inc is involved in many activities, only one of which is managing and directing the activities of human beings.

The book opens with God, sitting in his plush office, watching TV. He's monitoring the war in Venezuela, or he's trying to, only he gets bored and switches to one of those church channels where a sweaty minister is exhorting his followers to celebrate the name of God. He finds this a whole lot more absorbing than war and other calamities confronting humanity.

Meanwhile, in the miracles department, a bunch of angels are trying to engineer small, every-day miracles like helping someone find their keys, having someone 'accidentally' find a few extra twenty-dollar bills in their pockets, engineering a seemingly coincidental meeting between two people and so on.

Craig is one those angels. He loves his job. When the story begins, he meets Eliza, a fellow angel, who's just been promoted from the department of prayers. She's eager and excited and Craig is delighted to show her the ropes.

God is, in his own way, fascinated with humans, he's a huge fan of sport and he loves Lenard Skynard. But lately, he's been growing tired of it all. He'd rather play golf than answer prayers which is incredibly hard to do anyway. He hasn't been particularly enthused by his job for a long time, so he decides to quit. And quitting means Armageddon as far as the Earth is concerned. It's going to be destroyed.

Craig and Eliza try to talk him out of it. He agrees to reconsider, on one condition. The two angels have to successfully answer a prayer, help two very shy, very awkward humans, get together. These are two people who like each other, but they are both unable to articulate that, and they get horribly tongue-tied when they try to ask each other out. The two angels have thirty days to get them together, or it’s the end of the world.

The angels begin by thinking that it’s going to be easy to get this couple together, and they try…but these two can't take a hint, even when the angels are working overtime to get them to see the obvious. It’s really funny. It's also a bit poignant, because this is how so many of us behave, getting in our own way, getting stuck in patterns of behaviour that we know are unhelpful, but we can't stop because we're creatures of habit.

This is a gem of a book. It's a short novel, at 176 pages, but the author packs a lot into those pages.