Modern
scholarship has laid waste to pretty much every miracle
story found in
the bible: creation in six days, the parting of the Red Sea,
the falling of the walls of Jericho, and the stopping of
the sun. Even the resurrection has a scientific explanation
these days. One story that hasn’t fared so badly is
Noah and the Ark. There are actually several independent
accounts of the epic flood extant from the ancient world.
Scholars agree, however, that the flood could not have been
as all-encompassing as that found in Genesis. In The
Preservationist David Maine shows us that the debate about whether and how
the flood happened is pretty much beside the point. Each
chapter of The Preservationist leads off with a verse from
Genesis which is then amplified to give it flesh and
blood. In a novel that offers many small pleasures, the most
significant is the bringing to life of Noah. According to
Genesis, Noah was 600 years old when the rains began. In
Maine’s hands, Noah is a wizened bag of bones and just
about the crankiest old coot you could ever imagine. This
is especially evident in his relationship with his wife,
a woman about 550 years his junior. Noah goes for days without
paying attention to her at all, and, by her own telling,
thinks of her as no more than a piece of chattel. Maine
also gives us a finely imaginative, yet somewhat tongue-in-cheek
rendering of Noah’s relationship with God. Throughout
his neighborhood, Noah is known as a man who has visions.
When God finally decides that he needs to destroy the world
with a flood, he comes to Noah as a voice in his head. What’s
funny is that when God speaks to Noah, he sounds pretty much
like the voice of God you might hear in a TV sitcom. In addition,
God gives no more instruction about how to accomplish such
a large task than what we see in the bible. It’s left
to Noah (actually, he pretty much delegates all of the work
to his children) to figure out how to craft the gigantic
ship and gather all the animals from the ends of the earth.
Of course, Noah lives in the desert and gathering wood and
pitch to make a boat the size of three football fields is
no easy feat. Nor is figuring out how to transport wild lions,
tigers, and elephants from far-away lands. All of this is
accomplished, however, and much more, through a combination
of human ingenuity and help from Above. One
of the striking things about the account of Noah in Genesis
(at least to modern ears) is that none of the women
are named. Maine, who clearly has a feminist sensibility,
plays upon the misogyny of the Bible by simply referring
to Noah’s wife as ‘the wife.’ At the same
time, Noah’s daughters-in-law are purposefully given
names by Maine and major roles in the narrative. His playfulness
with the names and roles helps Maine raise awareness of women’s
place in ancient society (i.e. they did most of the work
and held very little of the power) without hitting us over
the head with it. The
one criticism I have with The Preservationist is that it
does not go beyond the traditionalist explanation for
why God felt it necessary to bring on the flood. In one chapter
we meet a group of people that, with construction on the
ark underway, have come out from the local village to mock
Noah. As
some in the crowd are
heckling him, others are consorting with a prostitute right
out in
the open. The scene has a funny, carnivalesque feel to it, yet
this
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