By David Maine

From the internationally acclaimed author of The Preservationist comes a provocative retelling of the story of Adam and Eve, Abel and Cain—a novel of temptation and murder, of exile and loss.

Once expelled from the garden, Eve and Adam have to find their way past recriminations and bitterness to construct a 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.

From The New York Times

September 8, 2005

At Home With the First Dysfunctional Family

By Janet Maslin

David Maine’s Fallen builds suspensefully toward what is arguably the best-known episode in the story of mankind: the banishment of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. Given the fact that its denouement will surprise exactly nobody, this book’s power to rivet the reader approaches the miraculous.

Mr. Maine’s brand of biblical fiction first appeared in The Preservationist, a novel that brought wry, crotchety human emotions to the story of Noah’s ark. That turns out to have been a dry run for this quirky, delectable, much more daring book. As he manages to fuse genuine reverence and soul-searching with choice exchanges among Cain, Abel, Adam and Eve (“On the seventh day I rested.” “Oh stop.”), Mr. Maine writes in distinctive fashion. His inventiveness recalls Mark Twain’s reference to “Satan, the first consultant.”

Fallen—an instantly disarming book, thanks to the image of squabbling cherubs on its cover—is a risky, original undertaking. It is not one of those parasitical fables that siphon all their inspiration from borrowed material. Mr. Maine uses 40 chapters (a number with much biblical resonance, starting with Noah and the flood) to reconstruct the early Book of Genesis in reverse, as a way of amplifying hindsight and regret. So the book begins with the chronologically last part of its story, Chapter 40, when Cain is a tormented old man on the verge of death. He is “stubborn as a tortoise and half as expressive.”

But as Fallen dials backward through time, it begins to make Cain more expressive. By Chapter 34 he is wandering in the desert, bearing God’s mark. (“What’s that on your face?” ask someone he meets. “Some kind of. Oh.”) He avoids looking in pools of water, but there is no escaping what the stigma commemorates. “You were the whole reason I did this,” confides a feral young boy who has casually committed murder. “You were the, the, inspiration.”

Sometimes Cain is haunted by the ghost of Abel, the brother he killed. The guilt is terrible, but the event grows less absolute as Cain gets younger and Abel returns to life. One of Mr. Maine’s imaginative feats in Fallen is to ascribe ordinary motives to the brothers’ story, even as he juxtaposes their rivalries with the towering presence of God in their lives.

So when the book revisits the pivotal moment for the brothers—when God accepts Abel’s offering of livestock while scorning the harvest offered by Cain—Cain’s bitterness is frank. “You never actually have a conversation, do you notice?” he says about God’s judgment upon him. “It’s a bit more one-sided than that.”

Move backward some more and Cain’s grudge against his brother becomes more specific. “His two favorite words are you should, followed by you shouldn’t,” the book observes about Abel. “Often the advice is perfectly reasonable, which, of course, makes it no easier to bear.”

And this is hardly the only conflict in what Mr. Maine construes as the planet’s first dysfunctional family, with its reside of secrecy, guilt and remorse. Beyond telling his two eldest sons, “Your mother and I are not from here,” Adam has been reluctant to talk about the past.

The book’s tensions heighten as it moves inevitably toward revelation and finger-pointing. At first it sanctions Adam’s engaging in denial “to allow himself a good chance of getting up each morning and facing the day’s demands without falling to earth in foaming, incoherent rage.” But the taunting of his sons means that nothing about the Garden of Eden can remain out of bounds. And as a teenager, Cain is real and petulant enough to complain that the whole story makes no sense. Why didn’t God simply remove that forbidden tree if he didn’t want Adam and Eve to touch it?

By now Mr. Maine is navigating deep waters. But he is able to juxtapose a boy’s naïveté, the original sin of his parents and the most basic and unanswerable theological questions, all in the space of a spare, sometimes ironic story. Was Adam bored when he was alone in the Garden, Cain wonders? “Not exactly bored,” Adam says. “But I will admit to a degree of loneliness after a time. Which brings us to your mother.”

The way Fallen addresses creationism reveals the full measure of its depth and delicacy: again, the boy’s literal-mindedness is contrasted with the ineffable knowledge and failure of his father. And again, the book’s suspense lies in anticipating how Mr. Maine will deal with the most basic philosophical and religious questions toward which Fallen is moving. Here is the measure of the book’s success: its last page is its best.

Mr. Maine’s approach to the Scriptures is necessarily adaptive. The early sections of Genesis are very brief and do not lend themselves to any form of pragmatic approach. Adam lived 930 years, according to the King James Bible, and begat many children. This book gives him a more realistic life span, envisions different skin colors among its characters and adds a midlife crisis. The point in his 40′s at which Adam realizes that he will one day return to dust makes him yearn desperately for sexual affirmation.

As for begetting, Adam and Eve have a dozen or so children here. But the book brings a sense of astonishment to the arrival of strangers on the scene. Where did they come from? Can they have known Eden? Adam’s encounter with one man allows Mr. Maine to underscore the incomparable importance of the events that Fallen takes on. “When I asked about tame lions and stars of many colors, of honeycombs free from bees and flowers that never wilt,” says Adam, now banished to life among rocks and thistles, “he just stared at me as if I were raving.”