The Bible, first and foremost, is a story. That may seem obvious, but often, in the midst of theologizing and “application,” we can forget that what we’re dealing with is a narrative of creation, fall, and redemption. And perhaps no one reminds us so well of the Bible’s fundamental nature as the storytellers who take it as a point of departure. For centuries now, the enigmas of biblical narratives have generated further narratives designed to explore and explain the “cryptic conciseness” of a Bible “fraught with background.”1 In Paradise Lost, for example, John Milton spins twelve books of blank verse from only two chapters of Genesis. More recently, Walter Wangerin has rewritten key episodes from the Bible as novels in The Book of God and Jesus, and the poet Scott Cairns has reinvestigated biblical characters in his book Recovered Body. In that light, David Maine’s two novels, The Preservationist and Fallen, which, respectively, retell the stories of Noah’s Ark and Genesis 2–4, slide into place in a long tradition of biblical racounteurs.
What this tradition demonstrates is that a text’s literary choices inevitably carry with them theological implications. Theology does not fall from the sky in strings of symbolic logic; it rises from the gritty core of crafted plots, the turns of unpredictable characters, the ambiguities of word choice and chosen images. The literary and the theological are like the two strands of DNA: we can examine each separately, but in the end they are intimately linked, each one shaping the other.
Within this double helix, David Maine’s Fallen takes up the case of Cain, Abel, Adam, and Eve (in that order). Maine creates realistic characters and sets them loose, the better to examine human responsibility and the causes of evil, and he does all this while attempting to remain faithful to Scripture.
But what does it mean to remain faithful to Scripture? In cases where narratives retell the Bible, that is a difficult question to answer. Does it mean that you can add whatever you like so long as you don’t change what’s been given? Or must one’s own additions themselves remain faithful to a larger biblical picture, a more general theology (i.e., you cannot add whatever you like, but must add only in correspondence to orthodox Christianity)?
In Fallen, these questions become acute; literary choices sometimes unfold into brilliant theological perceptions and sometimes unravel into deep theological problems. Take, for example, the novel’s organization. Fallen has four parts, each containing ten chapters; the title of each tenth chapter matches the opening title of the next part, and the final chapter has the same title as the first.
The narrative, in other words, forms a giant cycle, a wheel rolling backward from Cain’s old age in chapter 1 through Abel’s murder and finally into the expulsion from Eden and the Fall itself. And indeed, this cyclical view of history seems faithful to the Hebrew text.
As Robert Alter notes in his rendering of Genesis, Cain’s conversation with God contains “several verbal echoes of Adam’s interrogation by God and Adam’s curse, setting up a general biblical pattern in which history is seen as a cycle of approximate and significant recurrences.”2 Fallen‘s organization, in other words, highlights a specific facet of the Hebrew text we might otherwise fail to notice.
But it does more for Maine: Fallen‘s organization opens a discussion of sin, guilt, and human responsibility. Its cycle repeats themes and incidents in slightly altered forms, so that one sin soon resembles another. In Adam all sinned, Paul writes in Romans, and by the end of Fallen each character partakes in a pattern of sin that traces all the way back to the Fall.
As Maine traces sin backwards, however, the path of causality and responsibility ramifies rather than simplifies. Who is guilty for Abel’s murder? Cain, certainly, but as the novel backs up we learn that others have contributed. Prior to Abel’s smug uprightness, Adam beat and banished Cain, stoking his anger, and Eve, on repeated occasions, failed to intervene. Thus, Maine tracks a trail that divides and divides again, leading to each character. In the end, one sin implicates everyone, for in varying degrees, Maine seems to say, all are responsible for all.
Not every literary device works quite so well. In particular, Maine seems repeatedly tripped up by his choice of genre. Fallen presents itself as a quasi-realist novel. In that light, God, a problem for any author, becomes particularly difficult to manage. How will he appear? What will he say? In Paradise Lost, for example, God appears anthropomorphically, but he speaks a language all his own. Maine takes the opposite approach: God shows up only in natural objects—clouds, trees, and boulders—but when he speaks, he speaks an ordinary tongue.
In The Preservationist this worked superbly; the humor and ease of Maine’s first novel enables an all-powerful and majestic God to speak colloquially and get away with it. Bill Cosby echoes in the background as Noe, slightly confused, asks:
“Lord, about this vessel.”
—Make it big, advised Yahweh.
In Fallen, however, humor and ease disappear, and suddenly God’s colloquial speech seems ridiculous, even petty. Expelling Adam and Eve from the Garden, God sounds like a petulant boss:
“You have until dusk,” he squawks. “To do what?” asks Eve. “To leave.” Oh. One almost expects an overweight security guard to tap her on the shoulder.
Perhaps the greater problem with Fallen‘s God, however, is not his words but his dimensions (or lack thereof). In The Preservationist, Maine portrayed a God of many sides, full of both rage and grace. A sense of humor peppered his supreme seriousness. He destroyed, but he also saved. He provided, but he called on humans to act. In Fallen, on the other hand, God loses both complexity and playing time: not only is he flat, he is conspicuously absent. Instead of an active LORD continually intervening, we encounter a hanging LAW, and little else. Punishment becomes God’s pastime, so much so that Adam worries about appeasing him. Justice, hard and harsh, wipes mercy from the text.
One small detail can perhaps illustrate this unfortunate tendency, revealing a great deal about Maine’s literary project in Fallen and its theological implications. In Genesis, God makes clothes out of animal skins for Adam and Eve before expelling them from the Garden; in an act of mercy, he provides.
In Fallen, on the other hand, Adam and Eve, having already been expelled, kill a wounded gazelle and discover the use of its skin on their own. From that point on, Maine sketches a shorthand anthropological tale as Adam and Eve learn to hunt and fish, grow vegetables, and build shelter. Adam might occasionally suggest that God has provided (as with the gazelle), but Maine seems reluctant to go further. The suggestion simply hangs in the air. Repeatedly asked by Cain why he bothers to worship this God (a question I found myself asking), Adam can never offer more than a dumbfounded tautology: “God is God.”
And yet Maine deserves credit for what he’s accomplished with Fallen—more, perhaps, than I’ve managed to suggest. Reinvigorating ossified biblical tales is not easy, particularly when grumpy reviewers parse the narrative for its theology. What Maine does, he does well, bringing to life characters who question, struggle, and develop, examining faith in a world where too often God does seem to disappear. Even so, both the literary and the theological aspects of Maine’s work seem richer and stronger in his first novel, The Preservationist, where humor punctuates the serious, and mercy mixes with wrath in a world slightly more mythic, but all the more believable precisely for being so.
Abram Van Engen is a graduate student in literature at Northwestern University.
1. Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative (Basic Books, 1981), p. 17. Alter borrows the phrase “fraught with background” from Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis.
2. Robert Alter, Genesis (Norton, 1996), p. 18.
Copyright © 2006 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine. Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
