Back to the Beginning

Title: Fallen
Author: David Maine
Published: 2005
Pages: 244

Reading Time: December 30, 2009-January 3, 2010.

Plot Teaser:
Once expelled from the Garden, Eve and Adam have to find their way past recriminations and bitterness to construct a new life together in a harsh land. But the challenges are many for the world's first family. Among their children are Abel and Cain, and soon the adults must discover how to be parents to one son who is everything they could hope for and another who is sullen, difficult, and rife with insecurities and jealousies. In the background, always, is the incomprehensibility of God's motives as He watches over their faltering attempts to build a life. In Fallen, David Maine has drawn a convincing, wryly observant, and enthralling portrait of a family-one driven (and riven) by passions, jealousies, irrationality, and love. The result is an intimate, in-depth story of brothers, a husband, and a wife-people whose struggles are both completely familiar and yet utterly original.

How I Got It:
I found this hardcover edition sitting in the clearance pile of a Coles Bookstore inside Jackson Square, in Hamilton, Ontario. I believe it was either $4.99 or $5.99. Its premise grabbed my attention, as I have generally been interested in religious and Biblical tales.

The Review:
In Fallen, David Maine uses his imagination to expand upon the Biblical stories of Adam and Eve, and their first sons, Cain and Abel. And he does it backwards. The result is an alluring take on the world's first family; one that offers plenty of real world situations and gives flesh and bone to these familiar mythical figures. Maine creates a story that largely deals with survival, faith, mortal passions, and the quintessential questions of human origins and the role of the supernatural.

Fallen begins at the end of Cain's life. As an embittered old man, he lies alone in a cave, simply waiting to die. From this point of origin, David Maine works backwards, illuminating how things got to their present state. The book is divided into four separate parts titled The Murder, The Brother, The Family, and The Fall. Each section is itself split into ten parts, with chapter titles being repeated throughout, but always having different meanings depending on the part of the story currently being focused on. The book starts from chapter forty, and works its way down to one. This structure lends the book a commendable symmetry, as Maine deserves praise for taking the time to craft the book in such a careful and effective way.

To begin, the original stories that Maine is working from only cover a couple of pages of the entire Bible. With this type of source material, Maine's challenge was to stretch out a very well-known and brief story into a fully realized novel. I believe he has succeeded by providing a book that feels familiar, while being altogether underivative. He infuses each of the four main players with distinct personalities and characters. He manages to make Cain more than slightly sympathetic, while painting Abel as a bit of a simpleton. With Adam and Eve, he paints a less than ideal portrait of a union that is fraught with as much vitriol and animalistic urges, as it is with faith and love. These are real people with their own beliefs, motivations, and questions.

It is the questions that really give the book an extra edge, as they all stem from God's design. Cain is the rationalist who is obsessed with his parents' origins, and wonders why God would put any evil and temptation in Paradise to begin with. He asks free thinking questions about why his parents bother to continue to pay tribute to an allegedly fair God, when His actions have been nothing short of petty and irrational. Oddly enough, Adam and Eve are not altogether unaware of their specious devotion either. This kind of humanity and open questioning of God's motives propels the narrative, and is generally the reason why everything happens. Adam simply does as he is told, because that is all he has ever known, though he has frequent outbursts. Abel is content with his naivete. It is Eve and Cain who provide balance to this line of thinking by asking questions and suggesting alternate ways of living.

At its heart, the book is very literal and human. It is even brutal, in the way it describes the killing of animals, childbirth, Adam and Eve's lust for one another, and even Cain catching his parents in the act. That final scene in particular is startling in its perversity and honesty, and it is emblematic of Maine's tooth and claw approach to the story. While he stays faithful to the main events of the Bible, his expansions are often striking and entirely believable.

The only problems I had with the book were largely synthetic. There are quite a few idioms that get thrown around, and some of the word choice seems out of place for this time period. I also wondered whether mentions of winter and snow were appropriate, especially if the Garden was indeed around the Mesopotamian and North African regions. I realize this is a fictitious time and place, but the historian side of me felt a little odd during these sections. All in all, though, these are minor quibbles against what is otherwise a very captivating interpretation of one of the West's most well-trodden stories.

The Verdict:
Fallen is a book that is enjoyable for the religious and non-religious alike. Its story is so ingrained in Western culture, that non-Jews and non-Christians will be able to enjoy it on its own merits. The faithful would also do well to look into this book, as it makes many poignant challenges towards God in an honest and respectful way. Its questions about God, and its depiction of Adam, Eve, Cain, and Abel as a truly messed up family that is trying to find out its purpose is something anyone can appreciate. It is a story of survival in the wilderness, and all that entails.

4/5

Next Up:
Sunlight and Shadow by Cameron Dokey.