The Divine Comedy

The Divine Comedy is a fugue and a black comedy. In delicious and bawdy detail, an unnamed narrator offers snapshots into the lives and loves of an astonishing cast of philanderers and fuckups while along the way, the evidence amasses for a comic, cosmic conspiracy.



Craig Raine's second novel, The Divine Comedy, is a voyeuristic meditation on sex and insecurity, God and the nature of the human body - its capacity for pleasure and pain, its desires, disappointments, and its many mortifying betrayals.



Craig Raine was born in 1944 and educated at Exeter College, Oxford. He became editor of Quarto in 1979 and was subsequently Poetry Editor at Faber from 1981 to 1991. He is now an emeritus Fellow at New College, Oxford, and has been the editor of Areté, the arts tri-quarterly, since 1999. He is the author of six works of poetry, and his Collected Poems 1978-1999 were published in 2000. His verse drama, '1953' was directed by Patrick Marber at the Almeida Theatre in 1996. He is the author of two collections of literary essays and, most recently, a critical study T. S. Eliot (2007). The Divine Comedy is his second novel.



Craig Raine's novels are brilliant and that's the end of it... Invigorating, bleak, sexy, gross, funny, and weirdly educational



Amusing and provocative