Cain Goes to the Tape

Two decades after José Saramago detonated The Gospel According to Jesus Christ and earned the Catholic Church's lasting displeasure, the Portuguese Nobel laureate returned to the source material one more time. Cain, published in 2009 and translated into English by Margaret Jull Costa, was the last novel he wrote before his death in June 2010, and it is essentially a closing argument. The conceit is that Cain - the Bible's first murderer, the man God marked rather than killed - becomes a time traveler through the Old Testament, dropping into the major set pieces of Genesis and beyond, watching God act, and concluding that the divine resume reads like a war-crimes brief. The Catholic Church in Portugal duly condemned the book on release. Saramago, an avowed atheist and Marxist who never made any secret of either, would have considered that a successful launch.

This is not a novel in any conventional sense; it is a prosecution. The defendant is Yahweh. The prosecutor is a fratricide who keeps showing up at the scenes of God's larger crimes and asking, with mounting incredulity, whether any of this can possibly be defended. Whether the indictment lands depends on what a reader wants from a book - and on whether Saramago's signature style, which throws away quotation marks and runs dialogue and narration into one another inside long, comma-stitched paragraphs, reads to you as biblical or as exhausting.

The Time Traveler's Indictment

The book opens with Saramago's reframing of the Eden story. The Original Sin, the Fall, the expulsion of Adam and Eve - all of it, in Cain's telling, is a rebellion against a dictatorial and unjust ruler rather than the cosmic catastrophe scripture treats it as. By the time Cain himself murders Abel and receives the famous mark and the equally famous protected status, the narrative theology of the book is already established: God is not a being to be reasoned with, only one to be survived. Cain is then granted, by some narrative magic the novel doesn't bother to justify, the ability to drift backward and forward through biblical time. He becomes the witness Saramago wants - present at every set piece, free to comment, unimpressed by miracles.

The structural cost of this conceit is real, and most reviewers have flagged it: the book is episodic almost by design, and the episodes don't build toward a conventional novelistic climax. One critic put it as "one damn thing after another," which is unfair only by degree. Cain is less a character than a pair of borrowed eyes, an ironist with a donkey and a grudge, and the novel works on you through accumulation rather than arc. If you need plot pull, this isn't the book for that. If you can read it as Saramago apparently meant it - a sustained, comic, furious commentary - the looseness is part of the point.

From Abraham to Babel

The specific episodes are where the book is at its sharpest. Cain arrives at Mount Moriah just in time to stop Abraham from killing Isaac - because in Saramago's revision the angel God dispatched to intervene was delayed by an accident, and would have arrived too late, and the whole near-sacrifice would have ended in an actual sacrifice. The implication is theologically devastating. God's mercy, in the canonical text, depended on competent angelic logistics; without Cain freelancing, Isaac dies. From there Cain follows Abraham to Sodom and Gomorrah and watches the negotiation over the ten righteous people, witnesses the destruction, and finds the ledger of the slaughter unbearable. Children. Innocents. A God who agreed to spare the cities for ten just souls and then incinerated everyone anyway.

The Tower of Babel passage may be the funniest moment in a book that is funnier than its reputation suggests. Cain finds the tower beautiful and the human ambition behind it admirable; God, jealous and small, dismantles it. In one of Saramago's gleefully irreverent asides, the narrator notes that the builders had all originally spoken Hebrew, and that in order to confuse them God had to invent, on the spot, a set of languages that did not yet exist - English, German, French, Italian, Basque, Latin, Greek, and even Portuguese - which is the kind of joke that tells you exactly what kind of book you are in.

Joshua, Job, and the Weight of the Case

The case keeps building. Cain witnesses the destruction of the Tower of Babel. He drops in on Moses and the golden calf. He watches Joshua at Jericho - the massacre of every man, woman, and child inside the walls, then the same fate at Ai. In Saramago's version, Cain has by now picked up some skill with donkeys, and the conquerors of Canaan are friendly to him, but he turns away in revulsion and resumes his wandering. The amendment Saramago makes to the famous miracle is itself a comment: in this novel, God doesn't stop the sun for Joshua; God merely parts the clouds, providing better fighting light for an ongoing slaughter. The grandeur of the canonical miracle gets traded down for a logistical assist to genocide.

Then there is Job. Cain witnesses the trials Yahweh inflicts on a faithful man at the bet of an adversary - the cattle, the children, the boils, the entire bureaucratic spectacle of suffering as theological wager. By this point the book has stopped pretending it is asking a question. It is making a claim. The God of these stories, Saramago insists through Cain, behaves in ways that no human authority would be permitted to behave; the only thing that has historically made these acts unobjectionable is the identity of the actor. Strip the divine title and read the resume cold: this is the figure scripture asks people to worship.

The Ending Nobody Sees Coming

The closing episode is where the novel transcends its essay-with-illustrations structure and becomes something more disturbing. Cain travels back further in time to Noah, and watches the Ark being built. He critiques the engineering - the thing wouldn't float as designed - and in this telling Noah is so out of his depth that the construction has to be finished by angels and by God himself. God then, in what Saramago plainly considers a catastrophic miscalculation, orders Cain to take passage on the Ark for the coming Deluge. Skip the rest of this paragraph if you want the ending fresh. Once aboard, Cain methodically kills Noah's sons, their wives, and Noah's wife. Noah, watching humanity end inside his own boat, jumps into the floodwaters. The Ark settles on Mount Ararat with Cain alone aboard. The species is over. Saramago has, with one last argumentative gesture, used the Bible's own restart button to end the human story instead of saving it.

That ending is what lifts Cain above its weaker structural choices. It is also what makes it a 3.5 rather than a 4. The accumulated argument is real and at moments brilliant, the prose is alive with aphorism and colloquial mischief, the humor is more present than detractors give it credit for. But Cain himself never quite earns the depth of a character; he is a vehicle, and the book sometimes feels closer to a polemic with set design than a novel with a soul. For Saramago admirers, this is essential, and a fitting last word from a writer who spent decades fighting with God on the page. For readers in for a difficult literary style and a willingness to be argued with, it has plenty to offer. For everyone else, the punctuation alone may be the deal-breaker - and that is, in its way, the book deciding for itself who it wants in the room.

Rating: 3.5/5 ⭐

Perfect for: Saramago readers, anyone interested in literary atheism with teeth, readers who can sit with a sustained argument against the God of the Hebrew Bible and don't need a conventional plot arc.

Skip if: Unconventional punctuation drives you up the wall, you want narrative momentum and developed characters, or critique of biblical authority reads to you as offensive rather than thought-provoking.