Adam Raised A Cain

As I've mentioned before, I dig retold Bible stories despite being somewhat cloudy in my deism. They work somewhat in the way of cover songs, recasting the familiar in a new light, and somewhat in the way of the science fiction or fantasy tale. Those distant B.C. years are far enough gone as to be seem a completely different world. And of course the source material isn't long on the telling detail, so applying the lens of modern psychological fiction to the scant lines of Genesis can really bear fruit.

In Fallen, David Maine -- whose most recent of his four novels utilizes 1950's monster movies, not the Bible, as his source text, and therefore can't be said to be a one-trick pony -- essentially covers the first 17 lines of Genesis chapter 4. In a stylistic approach that pays off both thematically and plotwise, Maine retells this story backwards, ala the movie Memento, progressing (or regressing) from the death of Cain to the expulsion from Eden of Adam and Eve. Further, the novel is divided into sections in which the narration hews to a particular point of view: first Cain as the exiled murderer, then Abel as the dutiful but naive brother and son, then Adam as father and provider, then Eve as tempted and temptress.

Strategically, both structural forms pay off. By moving backwards, the notion of consequence is foregrounded moreso than the notion of destiny, although Maine plays with those larger lapsarian questions as well. From a story standpoint, where only trouble is interesting, Cain is more fascinating after the murder than before it, and the banishment of Eden is going to be slightly more vital through Eve's lens, as she carries the fuller experience of temptation, so it is only right and fitting that we are tied to their point-of-view.

The backwards form also heightens the sense of an expanding world, as we watch it being built in reverse. The initial chapters touch on the construction of the city of Enoch, designed by Cain and named for his son, and populated with the people who by that time filled the earth-- a hundred and thirty-plus years into the life of Adam. The late chapters, in which Adam and Eve wander without shelter, at the mercy of the weather and wild animals, are brutal and sparse, highlighting the absence of the glories of the Garden but also echoing back to the civilization that they, through family, create. Naked but for their girdles of fig leaves, Adam and Eve need to invent the means of survival -- the spear, the fishing net, the clay brick. Maine's approach also makes foreign the first pregnancy, the first butchering of the first carnivore, all of which only carry mystery and mystique in this text because they follow after the first murder. Again, this lends a science fiction or perhaps magical realist glow to the book, in that so much of what is commonplace to us is described in ways that make it new.

As in the Preservationist, Maine handles the alien (to follow a conceit) presence of God in this story with a light touch, a presence that may or may not be material, whose ways can be neither anticipated nor understood, the ultimate in inscrutable characters.