Jenny Diski’s novel, Only Human: A Divine Comedy, is a retelling of the biblical story of Abraham and Sarah, so the bare bones of the novel’s plot outline are familiar. It begins with Sarai and Abram’s (not yet Sarah and Abraham’s) childhood in the city of Ur, and follows them through their marriage, their adult lives, their eventual treks to Canaan and Egypt, and the late-in-life birth of their son Isaac. It ends with the story of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac on Mount Moriah. All of the events of Sarah and Abraham’s life, sparsely told in 12 chapters of Genesis, are recounted here.
But this familiar story is transformed in Diski’s 215-page novel. She recasts the ancient tale as the story of God and Sarah’s tug-of-war over Abraham. She gives each of the characters, from Abraham to Sarah to Isaac to God, a personality far beyond what is written in the original text. All of them seem entirely real, and, in a way, entirely modern.
Diski tells the story from the dual perspectives of Sarah and God. The Sarah portions are told in the third person, but God speaks directly to the reader. And this is no Hebrew school God. Omnipotent He might be, but omniscient He certainly isn’t. In this retelling, God is constantly surprised, outwitted, even manipulated by His creations. Describing humanity’s birth, He says: “And then I made my great error. I made sentience. I made I am. Whatever anyone might say, I did not know what the consequences would be. Until I made the world, there had been no consequence, only inconsequential eternity. How could I have known?”
At the beginning of the novel, God describes His previous, unsuccessful, attempts to control His creation: His anger at Adam and Eve’s willful disobedience in Eden, and His destruction of the world (save Noah and some animals) in a fit of pique.
The crux of Diski’s novel is that God sees Abraham and Abraham’s descendents as His final chance to gain a toehold of control over at least part of humanity. He needs Abraham as much as Abraham needs Him. Diski’s God is willful, needy, often befuddled by the world…in other words, more or less human.
Diski’s depictions of Sarah and Abraham are no less unusual, and she examines aspects of their lives only hinted at in the biblical text. For example, their story begins with the child Sarai tagging along adoringly at the heels of her teenage half-brother Abram. When their father decides that they are to marry each other (at ages 13 and 23), Sarai and Abram must learn to think of each other as husband and wife rather than brother and sister. Diski explores the confusion that this causes them both.
By adulthood, Diski’s Sarai is a practical woman with a sometimes biting wit, unconcerned with thoughts of God or theology. When Abram comes to her and tells her that God has instructed him to leave Harran and journey to a new land that He will give to him, Sarai reacts in the way most contemporary women would–with disbelief, and the fear that her husband must be mad. She asks:
“Ah. Does it [the land] have a name?”
“He will show us the land. He promised to lead us to it.”
“Is it an empty land, or are other people already living in it?”
“It will be our land. The Lord will show us. Sarai, we have been offered a destiny.”
“Or destitution.”
Nonetheless, God wins out over Sarai this and every time, and so she and Abram travel to Canaan.
The book jacket blurb on the cover of this novel sums it up as “a bitterly comic love triangle between man, woman, and God.” This seems an unlikely description of the relationship between God and humanity, but in this story, man, woman, and God are on relatively equal footing. All have power over each other, and all seem eminently human. And given the inherent difficulty of simply portraying mortal fictional characters’ humanity, it is particularly impressive that Diski has managed to do this for God as well.
