Eve: Her Story

Penelope Farmer is best known to me as the author of my eerie childhood favourite, Charlotte Sometimes. (There is a gorgeous story about Farmer and a companion being invited to a concert by The Cure, who used quotes from the book as well as naming a song after it, and being quite nonplussed by the whole experience.) I was an adult when Penni Russon introduced me to the other books in the trilogy, the hitherto unsuspected Emma in Winter and The Summer Birds (still hunting for my own copies of those.)

So when I spotted her adult novel from 1985, Eve: Her Story, on Brotherhood Books, curiosity drove me to order it. However, curiosity seems to have exhausted itself after that, and it's sat at the bottom of my To Read pile for literally years until I finally picked it up this wee.

Well, it's a weird little novel and perhaps I was right not to be too eager. It's a very 1980s feminist-Virago take on the Genesis creation story, incorporating a lot of research that Farmer put into compiling a collection of creation myths at around the same time. The Garden of Eden turns out to have been quite crowded, with not just Adam, Eve and Jehovah, but also Adam's first wife Lilith, various angels, fallen and otherwise, and 'the serpent' who in this telling is humanoid, though scaly, and the inventor of metal-working, fire and agriculture. I think I'm too ignorant of Jewish folklore and the struggle between ancient matriarchal religions and patriarchal monotheism to fully appreciate Farmer's work. Eve: Her Story was a peculiar diversion but it didn't really grip me.