In Competition No. 2736 you were invited to submit bible stories as retold by modern authors.
There were plenty of eager contenders, and unsurprisingly so. Works of heavyweight literary scholarship have documented the all-pervasive influence of the King James Bible on British and American literature. The rhythms of its language are clearly discernible in the work of writers as diverse as Wodehouse, Hemingway and Kipling, who mined not only its style but its content too. Kipling’s phrase ‘dark places of the earth’ (from Psalm 74:20) is also borrowed by Conrad in Heart of Darkness.
You clearly had great fun with this assignment, letting the likes of Jilly Cooper, Irvine Welsh and J.K. Rowling loose on Sunday School favourites. I was especially entertained by E. Blake’s ‘Samson and Delilah’ as retold by Jackie Collins and by M.E. Ault/Lionel Shriver’s We Need To Talk About Cain.
The winners are printed below and are rewarded with £25 each. W.J. Webster takes the extra fiver.
Paul Griffin, a regular presence on these pages over the years, died last month. His vim, wit and skill will be much missed.
The ark he built of gopher. He had been on the earth for six hundred years. He knew wood, and he knew boats. A boat you could make of oak or cedar but to build an ark of three hundred cubits you needed the long, straight grain of gopher. He ran the ham of his fist along the smooth curve of a plank. This is like the old days, he thought, when the world was fresh and clean, when men lived with honour, and women stood proud in their beauty. Now, God knows, there is only corruption, and mankind is rotting like stalks in a midden. He turned away from the ark. The sky was the soft blue of a jay’s fanned wing but along the horizon ran a black, inky line of cloud. The rains are coming, he thought. It is the time to round up God’s innocent creatures.
From Ernest Hemingway’s Giants on the Earth, a reworking of Genesis. As revealed to W.J. Webster
It wasn’t my kind of homicide. It wasn’t a big-city crime, there were no mob connections and it was as open and shut as a salesman’s sample case. But a P.I. gets to wondering, even if he’s not hired to — maybe especially when trade is down. Its flavor of the Old West intrigued me, livestock and crop farmers at each other’s throats, blood on the prairie. Then again it was a family affair, the killer being the squeaky wheel that never got the grease. Too bad for his kid brother. The facts were about as uplifting as a fight in a Tijuana whorehouse. Cain tried to give it some class by bringing God into it, but that was window dressing. I poured myself a drink and frowned at the telephone that hadn’t rung since Pearl Harbor, wondering much of the story Eve had put a lid on.
Basil Ransome-Davies/Raymond Chandler
To see the Philistines, you had to peer across a bleary battlefield, and let your eye travel along the lines of rusty mail. Eventually, if the fog lifted, you caught a glimpse of Goliath, a sporting old trooper, with old-fashioned brass greaves. He was a few cubits taller than most of the champions. ‘One for the scalphunters,’ murmured David. According to the archives, the Circus had been running Goliath for a decade, after turning him in Askelon. ‘I’ll sort this out, shall I?’ suggested David. ‘You do what you damn well like,’ retorted Saul.
David rummaged in his pockets for a pebble. Christ, get on with it! He wandered mock-casually across to Goliath, and fished out a sling. Steady. One swing, and the pebble cracked Goliath’s skull. He went down like a badly made book-case.
‘Triple-bluff,’ said David a few minutes later, handing over the head. He ordered a Bloody Mary.
Bill Greenwell/John Le Carré
Bathsheba looks as sexy as a dozen Playmates with a lifetime supply of good mescaline. When David gets an eyeful of her naked, hormones take over his bloodstream like cheap Mexican heroin flooding a Texas border town. She’s a soldier’s wife, but so what? He’s the king. He wants her, he has her. Then the situation skids out of control; there’s a kid on the way. It’s imperative to schedule a cover-up quickie with the husband. David summons him home from war, but the weasel is this twisted, gung-ho fanatic who won’t do the deed with his wife. David rigs the next battle to kill him, which the poor bastard deserves for wimping out on mind-blowing sex. Some heinous prophet shows up, more insane than a biker with an infected tattoo, jabbering, ‘Repent! Repent!’ The baby dies. But the next baby turns out to be Solomon, so all is copacetic.
Chris O’Carroll /Hunter S. Thompson
In the Beginning there was . . . . Well, I suppose that’s the point, isn’t it, what was there? I remember, in no particular order, great gouts of earth and a voice upon the deep, but whether or not it was My voice and, if so, what I spaketh, I cannot, at this remove, quite remember. I know that fish made an appearance at some point and I am certain there were fowl of the air in there somewhere, but if I were to be asked to name the days, I’m afraid I would have to smile blankly and shrug My shoulders in that manner common to a certain sort of rather vague and feckless, aging Deity.
Frank Osen/Julian Barnes
Listen: Jesus Christ has come unstuck in time. The trafalmadorians say that there is no time, everything always happens and everyone is always alive and always dead. So it goes. Jesus was born a human so it applies to him. But his father was God, so maybe it half applies to him. Jesus doesn’t know about that, all he knows is there are a lot less guys around him than there were yesterday. So it goes. Judas betrayed him, Peter pretended he did not know him, and everyone else seemed to have to go home to eat supper or shut the chickens in. So the soldiers came and put him on a cross. At the last moment even God deserted him, and only the soldiers watched him die, if he was alive. So it goes.
William Danes-Volkov /Kurt Vonnegut
No. 2739: second thoughts
You are invited to submit a poem lamenting an impulse buy on eBay (maximum 16 lines). Please email entries, wherever possible, to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 14 March.