|
The Book of Samson is David Maine's third novelization of a popular Bible tale, The Preservationist about Noah's Ark and Fallen about Adam and Eve preceding it. Samson is silly and resolutely lightweight, apparently conceived, blueprinted and written in a short enough time that its publication could coincide with the release of Fallen in paperback. Maine has devoted virtually no thought to the book's framing and has Samson narrating his autobiography while chained up and awaiting his ceremonial execution at the hands of vengeful Philistines. We therefore wipe from episode to episode with the aid of such haphazard scene changes as this: "In the meantime [i.e. while I wait here alone and in chains] let me tell you about how I became a judge."
There is actually first-rate precedent for a humorous, modern-update revision of the Bible in God Knows, Joseph Heller's mordant and melancholy life of King David. Heller's book, full of riffs and comic anachronisms but also rich in character, pulled off the considerable trick of illuminating some of the more confused aspects of the David story while entertaining with its stand-up-shtick prose.
In comparison, Maine (who actually steals one of Heller's best jokes, about the real reason Solomon wanted to cut that baby in half) has slighter ambitions. The Book of Samson is for the most part an amusing and palatable gloss on the scripture for those who would rather not be seen in a café reading the Bible. Apart from a teenage run-in that introduces Samson's love of violent justice and a few elaborations to underscore his titanic horniness, the novel does not deviate from scripture or add much to the original.
The script—or scripture—is the most indelible interlude in the brief and bloody Book of Judges. It's a somewhat bizarre patchwork of etiological and historical myths, which explain the origins of place-names and, more importantly, extol the ancient Jewish heroes who gloriously slaughtered pagans. Samson stands apart from the other sanguinary judges (such as Deborah and Gideon) because he was both the strongest and the most fallible—only he is endowed with sufficient personality to give his heroism a human, and tragic, dimension.
Samson's weakness is for demanding women. On two separate occasions he ruins himself by revealing secrets to women who, as the JPS translation has it, "nagged him" and "wearied [him] to death." The paradox here is what has captured the imagination of most readers through the ages: the interrelationship between physical strength and emotional dependence; love's ultimate superiority to muscle; or, less poetically, the astonishing power that women can wield from the bedroom.
But Maine does not seem especially interested in what he calls Samson's "weakness for harlots." Delilah (or, as Maine prefers, Dalila) does not exist at all beyond her plot function as a fantastic lay and insidious harpy. Instead of the human interest, Maine is attracted to the carnage. His Samson is essentially a loveable lunkheaded mass murderer, and it's impossible not to smile at our hero's earnest and adorable depictions of the savagery he commits against the Philistines. This is part of the killing spree he goes on after being cheated in a bet:
The twelfth was a hairy brute who wielded a loaf of bread as though it were a powerful club. He said—What devil has sent you among us? and I rammed the bread into his throat and left him to choke upon it.
The thirteenth and fourteenth together rushed me screeching some incoherent babble and I seized their heads like melons and slammed them together and let them drop. Like melons they broke and leaked away into dust.
Ah, Samson, with a loaf of bread? It struck me here that what The Book of Samson really lacks is an illustrator, or else a programmer to make a video game from this material.
So The Book of Samson is dopey stuff, and worse, it commits the grave offense of treating its readers like dopes ("I know you're hungry for sex and blood. Just a little longer I promise," Samson says while chained up, somehow managing not merely to talk to an audience thousands of years in the future, but to talk down to them). Yet the violence of the Book of Judges is a worthy subject for excavation. The Bible succinctly explains Samson's role in God's plan: "[God] was seeking a pretext against the Philistines, for the Philistines were ruling over Israel at the time." Thus Samson is, in the big picture, simply a psychopathic instrument for Israelite ascendancy and for God's exaltation over the Philistine deity Dagon—he's a fanatic.
On a few occasions, Maine looks into this uncomfortable truth. Before Samson is to be executed, a chief Philistine priest tries to convert him to Dagon in exchange for his life. "What kind of deity creates the world only to inject strife into it?" the priest argues with Samson. "Favors one tribe over another and then sets them at war? It makes no sense. It's beyond comprehension."
It may be worth an effort at comprehension, however. But alas, both Samson and Maine are already distracted, looking eagerly ahead to the kickass Xbox destruction that's about to take place in the Philistine temple.