Any God Will Do

Cover of the 1966 Random House first edition.

Any God Will Do, first published by Random House in 1966, is the sixth book by the American satirist and political novelist Richard Condon. After the almost unmitigated grimness of his previous book, An Infinity of Mirrors, it was a return to his more usual light-heartedness as displayed in works such A Talent for Loving. Although its theme is madness, unusually for Condon it has little of the almost gratuitous scenes of violence and sudden deaths that punctuate most of his books—the only notable instance being that of a haughty French sommelier who shoots himself at an aristocratic dinner party when he discovers that an American guest is indeed correct in asserting that a great white Burgundy can accompany young spring lamb.

The story, which takes place from 1918 to 1922 in New York City, Switzerland, and London, is simple and straightforward by Condon's standards. Francis Vollmer, an orphan of unknown parentage, is raised by a wealthy New York banker and develops an overwhelming obsession with the notion that he is the offspring of noble parentage, possibly even an illicit union of Kaiser Wilhelm and Queen Mary. Flitting in and out of overt madness, he spends the course of the book trying to determine his parentage. Except for The Manchurian Candidate, all of Condon's previous books had displayed a robust interest in food, menus, and gourmandizing; here that interest is carried to its highest level yet: Vollmer teaches himself to become a French chef of a professional level, and much of the book is concerned with the delights of the table.

Title

The title, as is the case in six of Condon's first seven books, is derived from the last line of a typical bit of Condonian doggerel that supposedly comes from a fictitious Keener's Manual mentioned in many of his earlier novels:

Interest is the key to life,

Interest in the clue,

Interest is the drum and fife

And any god will do.

The verse is found in only one place, as an epigraph on a blank page four pages after the title page and two pages before the beginning of the text. Unlike some of Condon's other books, however, in which the verse is clearly relevant to the theme of the book, this particular title, Any God Will Do, has no apparent relevance to what happens in the course of the novel.

Theme

The theme of the book is stated succinctly by the unfortunate female lover of Francis Vollmer: "He went mad because of snobbism."

"He had been a poor orphan boy. Without knowing it, he revealed that every time he told me that he had been a rich orphan boy. He has convinced himself that he is really the son a great and noble family. First he had to prove to himself that he was a better man than he thought he was; then he had to prove to everyone else that he was better than them because of the accident of his exalted birth. But he had invented all of it, it never had happened, and he drove himself quite mad."

Typical Condon quirks and characteristics

The novel offers several fine examples of the traits and stylistic tricks that are typical of Condon's work, among them, as the playwright George Axelrod once put it, "the madness of his similies, the lunacy of his metaphors". In a book in which the principle theme is social climbing, and the setting is Switzerland, we have:

She...took Francis in her arms, and began to ascend the north face of one of the highest orgasms she had ever climbed. On reaching the summit, she greatly cheered a young watercolorist painting in the garrett directly above them by celebrating the victorious ascent with outcries as exultant as those of a Cunard liner.

See also

• Crime fiction/Catalog of prominent writers