WTF, God?

So, you know the story. Adam and Eve taste of the tree of knowledge for better or worse (or something like that), get tossed out of the Garden of Eden by God's henchangels, and when their sons try to sacrifice to God the old codger plays blatant favourites (only blood is a good enough sacrifice) and so Cain flips out and kills his brother. As punishment, God lets him live, puts a mark on his forehead so that no one will harm him - including Himself. So Cain is left to wander the Earth like the guy in Kung Fu, drifting from Bible story to Bible story, witnessing the sacrifice of Isaac, the fall of the Tower, the genocides of the people of Canaan, the fall of Jericho, the burning of Sodom, the trials of Job, etc etc. And he pitches in where he can, but mostly he just calls God on His various failings.

I don't know if I've been chosen, but I know one thing, something I should have understood, What, That our god, the creator of the heavens and the earth, is completely mad, How dare you say the lord god is mad, Because only a madman who's not conscious of his actions would claim direct responsibility for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and then act as if nothing had happened, unless we're talking about pure undiluted evil, rather than true, involuntary madness...

Yep, even in his last novel, written in his late 80s, Saramago is up to his usual head-on run-on sentences where thoughts and arguments come tumbling arse over tit through the narrative. And a certain old-man cantankerousness aside (and some unfortunate comments about women and Jews, which may fit the timeframe but still jar a bit) it's not like the arguments he makes here, letting Cain, the first murderer held responsible for his crime, take God to task for the sheer unfairness of the human lot in a supposedly just world. Or rather "god"; it strikes me that Saramago doesn't capitalize any names here - human or divine. Which is fitting for a story that judges god on human terms - which, assuming that what we call civilisation is a long circle of god and man creating each other in each other's image, is as it should be. The problem is that, well, it's kind of been done before, hasn't it? While Saramago cleverly plays off the OT as a story, occasionally breaking the narration to talk directly to the reader and point out that yeah, nobody talked like this back in Biblical times but it's all a translation anyway, etc, rather than a dry picking apart of it, and there is a very clever twist at the end, it's not as if theodicy is an untilled field.

Still, it's a fun, angry rant against humanity as expressed through god, and while others have tackled the same story better (Marianne Fredriksson's The Book of Eve, for instance) it's a worthy sendoff.