First woman scorned | Review of ‘Eden Abandoned: The Story of Lilith’ by Shinie Antony

This short novel about Lilith, the first wife of Adam from the Bible, is one mad roar but it reflects our imperfect world and reality

A 19th century painting of Lilith by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. | Photo Credit: Wiki Commons

Possibly every woman who knows about Lilith remembers when she first heard of her. And her immediate response likely was, “Why wasn’t I told?!” Briefly, the apocryphal story of Lilith runs thus: God created Adam and Lilith out of clay, but Lilith was not submissive enough to Adam. So she left Eden, and a more compliant woman, Eve, was created out of Adam’s rib. Lilith went on to wreak havoc.

Though the scriptures teem with demons and screech owls that prey on infants and frighten young men in their sleep, Lilith is not mentioned by name in the King James translation of the Bible, at least. But this irresistible character, the first draft of womankind, the first first wife, features extensively in fiction, fantasy, television, video games, and heavy metal. Naturally, she is a favourite of feminists.

Life of resistance

In Shinie Antony’s Eden Abandoned, Lilith tells her own story, beginning with her short-lived passion in paradise. Even in the heat of her love for Adam, she is impatient with his fear of her ideas, his subservience to God, and his reluctance to think for himself. When she leaves him, she scorns him and she rages, but she also weeps for what she has lost. Because she must embrace something, she embraces the world of demons, and her life of resistance and subversion begins. Suddenly, she’s everywhere.

Antony’s writing matches the chaos that claws at the edges of humankind’s hard-won order, if we can call it order. Reading the book, one often has the feeling of cringing under a swarm of bats, infected with the horror that lurks just out of our field of vision. It may be incongruous to point out that there are imperfections in the language, when what we are hearing is one mad roar that lasts 13 chapters, incidentally numbered in reverse. But imperfections there are.

As for our imperfect reality, Lilith revels in the inbreeding and infighting of Adam’s world. We are left to ponder whether the disasters of our world are the work of Lilith and the demons. Or have they always come directly from God?

Eden Abandoned: The Story of Lilith

Shinie Antony

Hachette

₹499

The reviewer is the author of ‘Three Seasons: Notes from a Country Year’.