It’s been done before, sure. Taking a story from the Bible and fleshing it out, developing the elliptical characters of the Old Testament. Joseph Heller, for example, did it with varying degrees of success in God Knows, where he retold the story of David. The story of Noah and the Flood, from Genesis, which is the subject of David Maine’s debut novel, has already figured in Julian Barnes’ A History of the World in 101/2 chapters. Maine however, paradox though it may be, is not retreading old ground by unearthing the world’s best known disaster story. The key to his success is his use of language, and his intent. Heller, when writing God Knows, presents a wise-cracking King David who’s having a tiff with God, who is portrayed as a father figure with communication issues. Maine’s intent, using a language that is neither archaic nor joltingly modern, is to place flesh on the strangely brief Biblical episode, and to poke, prod and question it.
The story, divided into brief chapters is told from the perspective of the principal characters Noah, the Wife (resolutely unnamed!), Sem, Cham, Japeth, and their respective wives Ilya, Mirn, and Bera. It’s an eminently readable format, allowing for a 360? perspective on the events. So, we get Noah, or Noe as Maine takes his names from the Douay Bible (as if to clarify the purity of his intent), pondering his initial vision: “great age was not an obstacle to great deeds. Fatigue could be overcome; stiffness could be chased away. Forgetfulness could be managed or even turned to one’s own advantage. Yahweh’s words rattled in his ears as he hurried on. If you but have faith enough“. While the grand vision is countered, by the wife: “So when himself starts with the visions and the holy labors and the boat full of critters, what am I supposed to do? Talk Sense?” (Was Noah/Noe’s wife a Celt? Are we getting an Oliver Stone Alexander style repopulating of myth with Irish accented characters?)
The beauty of Maine’s retelling is its humanity. The Biblical event, perhaps unfairly narrated in my mind’s eye by Charlton Heston, is savagely devoid of sentiment and emotion, both of which Maine introduces deftly. In four short verses of Genesis all life, bar that gathered in the ark, is wiped out. Maine’s version allows for the enormity of this to sink in. Around the ark a whole community that had ridiculed Noe are washed away. Ilya reflects “A pang cuts me whenever I remember him, or the matriarchs, or my uncles. All gone now. But I can’t give in to grief about them – if I start I’ll never stop, there are just too many dead, whole peoples, whole civilizations. I hold their memory off, at arm’s length, and concentrate instead on measuring rainfall and striving to understand what is happening. If such a thing can truly be comprehended”.
While the book questions and probes, it pulls its punches somewhat. Many of the questions that jump screaming from the page of the Old Testament are examined – for example, Bera is sent to gather animals, thinking “I’m expected to return with no less than breeding families of every beast in creation. The problem with people who think that God will provide, is that they think God will provide”, and yet she does come back with all the animals required. For a book that pokes questions at Biblical authority, there’s a remarkable reservation to follow through on those very questions. To hold the story up to critical thought is to find holes in it, as surely as evolution blew away the guilty sex of Eden. We know the size of the boat, and we know that with the best will in the world one couldn’t fit a complete set of pairs from Dublin zoo (an interesting but far from complete collection), let alone every species on the planet, on it, and yet Maine demurs ultimately. You can’t inject a novelistic realism, and then fuzzily retreat back to the Biblical. This, in the Three Monkeys school of literary criticism, would be termed ‘having your cake and wolfing it down’.
Where the book is at its strength is examining the dynamics in the relationships in the characters, and this, given the nature of the source, can only lead to a certain feminist slant which is admirable. To give the women characters any voice is to improve on the original, and yet Maine goes further than that, arguably making Ilya and Bera in particular his strongest, most engaging characters.
There’s a lot to be admired and enjoyed in this debut novel – and I stress debut. Maine is a gifted, intelligent writer and one hopes he has more stories to tell. Hopefully the next one will land the knockout punch that his narrative skills deserve.
The Flood by David Maine is published by Canongate.