Below is the preface for Cain:Son of Adam.
A novel of this sort is bound to be misunderstood before it is even read or picked up. It is hard for me to take offence at this, given the current state of religious fiction. So, the potential reader may be forgiven for mistaking this book for a piece of modernist propaganda fit only for the trash pile or for a well-intentioned but artistically worthless fundamentalist tract. I feel obliged, therefore, to use this space to defend my work from these misconceptions (save only for this work’s artistic merit; my readers can decide that for themselves).
Therefore, I must offer the following clarifications:
First, this work does not argue for Young Earth Creationism of any kind, that is, it does not propagate the view that the universe is less than 6,000 years old. In fact, the question of how and when God created the universe is quite irrelevant to the subject matter; none of the human characters were around to witness it, nor would they have the language to describe what was happening in terms acceptable to modern science. Moreover, the focus of the story is not on the universe itself, but the human beings who inhabit it.
Second, this work assumes the traditional Christian teaching that all human beings are descended from a single pair of humans. Naturally, this means that the first generation after this pair would marry their siblings. So, yes, this work contains incest. No, it is not gratuitous, fetishized, or graphic.
Third, this works treats the source material with the respect it deserves. By source material, I do not only mean the Book of Genesis, but the various Jewish, Christian, and Islamic legends that sought to fill in the information gaps. The more modern stories and commentaries on Cain and Abel (any written after Milton’s Paradise Lost) I have found much less useful. Most of these seem to have been written by clever people who think that making the “good guys” and “bad guys” trade places gives a story depth, and seemed more interested in the theological fads of their day than in telling a good story. One notable exception is Rene Girard. My discovery of his Mimetic Theory was one of the catalysts inspiring this story.
Fourth, this is not intended as a work of historical fiction, that is to say, an attempt to reconstruct a historical period as accurately as possible. For those readers interested in the historical Cain and Abraham’s other Neolithic ancestors, I highly recommend the work of anthropologist Alice C. Linsley. For myself, I am not writing history, but mythology. By mythology, I do not mean a made-up story that has no basis in reality. Rather, I mean a story that, in its very telling, allows the reader to vicariously transcend reality as experienced day to day, to have the experience of passing beyond the veil of the ordinary world and into the World of the Forms, where good and evil and everything under and above the heavens can be seen and experienced sharp and vivid, with such clarity that the ordinary world, muddied and imperfect as it is, does not allow, and to return to “real life” bearing new sight and wisdom. Anyone who has read a truly great story will know what I mean by this. If my language for this experience seems overly religious, I can only reply that religion has been the primary business of mythology for all of human history.
Finally, I must insist that this work is not intended as a political allegory of any kind. There is no character that serves as a disguise for any modern political or religious figure. While such propaganda may have its (limited) place, there is nothing that dates a work of fiction as much as references to the politics of the day, or worse, a stance on them. I think that that is part of the reason that certain groups are so adamant that a story that does not seek to address current issues is a failure, regardless of other artistic merits. For mythology at its best functions as an enlightening escape from the monotony of day to day life, and that is the last thing these modern crusaders want to allow. To paraphrase J.R.R. Tolkien, they are intent on being jailers, obsessed with stone walls and iron bars and the small laws of their unimaginative ideologies, whose only use for entertainment is as a mirror for their own minds, white washed of any blotches or imperfections, stating nothing they do not already know or believe. Such people have always viewed visions of higher and broader things as threats, and thus have they always sought to put the visionaries in irons. This, they believe, is the only possible way to solve the issues of race, sex, class, and creed: to make us think of nothing else until the problems go away (though they never do, and their efforts only seem to make the captive audience resent them more).
As with the creation of the universe, I have chosen address these issues by ignoring them entirely. For the human community immediately post-Eden is one untroubled by the issues that vex our political discourse. There are no separate races or tribes to quarrel with one another. There are no social classes, only the family, common and kingly in equal measure. The sexes are at relative peace, resting in mutual respect. As for creed, every human character for most of the story abides by the family tradition of High Morality Monotheism, though it is a pagan Monotheism. By pagan, I do not mean polytheism, but the natural religious state of the majority of mankind prior to the coming of Christ: reaching out to God by intuition and imagination with only their own observations and the traditions of their parents as a guide, often projecting their own minds and hearts onto the cosmos to fill in the gaps.
It is in this environment that the world’s first murder occurs. And this fact, and its causes and implications, is far more relevant to our day than many of the issues that dominate our discourse.
For if we do not understand how our human community fell apart in the first place, how can we have any hope of putting it back together?
May God Bless You,
Bradley A. Poole