Celeste has terminal cancer. With no expense spared, her partner Michael turns to the brightest minds in medicine to save her. When this fails, the couple turn to religion. First Catholicism then Judaism and a pilgrimage to the well of Miriam which is said to contain healing waters. With no improvement apparent, they journey to an ashram in the hope that Ayurvedic medicine and the guidance of a swami can cure the disease. Nothing works. Michael embraces Islam and still there is no respite. Finally, he realizes there is no hope left and Celeste returns to modern medicine with only drugs to ease her final days of pain. After Celeste dies, Michael is bereft and filled with a sense of impotent rage against the very idea of a God that could seemingly turn His back on those who had prayed so hard. As an act of revenge against the institutions he feels have abandoned and betrayed him, he sets out to disprove the existence of God, to tear down religion once and for all. In order to do this he concocts an elaborate plan. He selects an orphaned young woman, Hamida Begum, who he will transport across the world to his stately home and sets about controlling her education and lifestyle. He hires a young man who is tasked with making her fall in love with him. But there are secrets in Hamida’s lineage that Michael could never have expected.

Omar Imady’s THE CELESTE EXPERIMENT is a literary novel with elements of the mystical and the occasional touch of magic realism. The author’s description of the final months of the relationship between Celeste and Michael are beautifully realized. There are passages of great tenderness and Imady brilliantly captures the intimacy of a couple in love and the desperation felt when illness rips them apart. The moment just after Celeste passes is particularly moving as Imady writes, “Michael experienced an extreme and overwhelming sense of aloneness, as though a cavern had opened up inside him and he found himself standing in it, completely and utterly abandoned. Had he screamed then, he would not even have heard an echo.” Indeed, much of Imady’s prose is exquisitely modulated with an attention to detail and a poet’s eye for metaphor and allusion. The experiment itself is somewhat confusing and, in relation to the passages of quite sophisticated theorizing about the nature and evolution of faith, rather prosaic. In effect, the use of the experiment and all of its elaborate machinations as the plot that drives the narrative after Celeste’s death almost derails an otherwise thoroughly absorbing investigation into the meaning and value of religion at times of crisis.

Author Omar Imady’s prose is measured and controlled in this thought-provoking and very well written novel that investigates religion and the mysteries of living and dying. Though the central plot is a touch over complicated and confusing, the words that drive it are frequently a delight.

~Kent Lane for IndieReader