Book Review: The Preservationist

The Preservationist is an interesting first novel by David Maine. Unlike other first novels, this one is not purely or semi autobiographical, rather it is inspired by the age old Biblical story of Noah and his ark from the book of Genesis. Like your childhood school task of 'Create a story from the outline given', David Maine takes the few outlines of the story from the Bible and creates a full fledged first novel out of it. The characters which are just names in the Bible are now characters which breathe, eat, drink, fight, gossip, rut, go through the entire gamut of emotions that all of us as human beings go through.

Born in 1963, and having travelled and lived all over the world primarily the desertscapes of Arizona, Morocco and Pakistan, it is interesting to see Maine's knowledge of vast deserts and the animals and insects that inhabit the desert plains make their way into the book. Maine's writing style is so simple but elaborate that picturesque images of the entire episode get created in your mind instantly. The book is an elegant retelling of the ancient story which captures people's efforts and hopes at a time of global disaster.

The names and quotations in the book are taken from the 1914 printing of the Douay Bible, which was an English translation from the Latin version. All names are spelled as in that edition. So Noah becomes Noe, and the God he answers to becomes Yahweh. We are also introduced to a string of characters belonging to the family of Noe: his wife (who incidentally is unnamed throughout the book and the Bible as well, even the wife herself can't remember her name in the novel), his sons - Sem, Cham and Japheth and their wives Bera, Illya and Mirn respectively. These three women are never named in the Bible; Maine names them, gives them voices, and turns them into his most fascinating characters, much more tougher than any of the muscled men. We see the Forrest Gumpian effort that Noe had to entail to bring this family of distinct personalities together to build a huge ark as God had instructed without being able to explain to his family why exactly the ark was being built. The book is awaiting a Mel Gibson to pick up the rights to make it into a spectacular movie laden with special effects.

Maine writes the entire episode in a very simplistically funny vein, for e.g.: In the following passage where he explains Noe's situation in the ark when he was unconscious for about 6 weeks:
"His day is simplified to its most basic elements:
1. Breathe.
2. Sleep.
3. Wake, or half-wake, into a foggy semi-delirium in which he chokes out half-intelligible words: Nigh tangles! or possibly Night angles! or maybe even Nightingales! Or perhaps something else entirely - nice angels? - or nothing.
4. Sip a little water from the cup the wife holds to his chin. Sip a little broth.
5. Chew a piece of carrot or flatbread, swallow it or spit it to dribble down his chin."

The great thing about the novel is that it is not preachy at all. Not about the Christian faith, not even about humanity in general. Maine could easily have slipped into a prophetical mode, where he draws parallel between the evils that plagued the society then with the ones today, and probably mention a similar catastrophe in waiting. But he avoids doing so. Instead he treats the novel just as if he is narrating a story to his kids.

Each of the characters in the family are as individualistic as any of the members in a real life joint family. So while Noe is the crazy guy who hears voices from above, his wife is this submissive, reticent lady who only does as she is instructed and expected of her. Sam is the obedient son, obedient to the point where he has no thought of his own and only listens to his father. Cham is the knowledgeable son, who has travelled far and wide and learnt more about the world outside. He is the primary boat builder. Japheth is a useless, accident prone no-gooder who can't see beyond the basic necessities of life. Sam's wife Bera is a calm, persistent and a firm believer in Yahweh. Ilya is an outsider to the family, who looks different from all the others and constantly has to face the discrimination. But since she is from a different land way up in the north, she has better knowledge of the world outside. Mirn is just a young girl, but with lots of common sense and a deep sense of curiousity for the happenings around her. While the characters are distinguished from one another by quirks and obsessions, their voices are not a problem, as the chapters alternate points of view. Every character in the story other than Noe narrates some chapters from their point of view, and then there is a narrator for Noe's part. So the story alternates between different people's first person views of the story to a third person view from time to time.

While the Bible only mentions that there was a flood and Noah and his family were entrusted with building an ark and filling it up with a male and female animal of all the species known to mankind, it offers little detail on how they actually built the ark or collected those many animals. Which Maine interestingly builds up in this novel. Maine also provides intricate details of the suffering that the family had to undergo on the boat. Writing in a breezy present tense, Maine imagines how they spend their time: telling stories, feeding larvae to birds, getting bummed out, rutting. He writes of the ship's interior: "From the darkness around them rises a dull effulgence of elephant dung, of rhino shit and wet hippo gas."

As the story progresses and the flood subsides, we even see the characters maturing as they set out to different corners of the earth to procreate and populate the earth again. And Noe's desperation as he realizes that Yahweh is no longer communicating with him, he has become one of the commoners who is left to do things on his own without any instructions. Slowly his wife grows old and dies and later he also dies a lonely death. These are the facts of the story as mentioned in the Bible, and they remain mysterious both to the characters and to the reader. Maine hasn't attempted to explain these mysteries, rather he leaves the reader wondering whether at the end of it all the entire episode was worth the trouble at all.