Some years ago I had read Saramago's controversial version of the new testament - Gospel according to Jesus Christ and had instantly fallen in love with it. In it, he had strongly questioned the stern and punishing ways of God. In Cain, he goes several steps further in arguing against the cruel divine methods, picking stories from the Old Testament to demonstrate the irrationality and cruelty of religion and faith.
In these stories, Cain, the son of Adam and Eve is the unifying thread. It is him we follow as he takes us to Babel, to Sodom, to Abraham's sacrifice of his son, to Lot, to Moses and to Job and to Noah, showing us again and again how vindictive and capricious God is. What is missing in the tales, however is depth of exploration - the characters are brushed and are out of focus. They hardly utter words or are explained. Job, Noah, Abraham - all appear as unthinking puppets, blindly following the God's bid. It is almost as if man had never eaten from the tree of knowledge. It is only Cain who is drawn out carefully and thinks - his character is drawn beautifully. He is resentful of God from the time he murders his brother, yet there is a certain acceptance in him of God's mercy, who pardons his crime and allows him a long life, albeit that of a wanderer. Slowly however, these stories begin to stir him and his bitterness towards God increases. The end of the book brings God and Cain at loggerheads in an interesting manner.

Cain is clearly written by an atheist, which Saramago famously has been. At the launch of Cain, he condemned the Bible as a chronicle of the worst in human nature, something which obviously found him many detractors. Unlike the Gospel...there is little debate in this book. Although God and Cain confront many times, they speak in cliches and you understand very little of God except consider him a stubborn child who wants all the attention.
Cain was an interesting read for me, a non-Christian who is not very familiar with the details of the bible and knows these stories only in bits and pieces. I wonder whether the stories will be appealing and fundamentally different for people who have grown up on their Biblical versions. And I do have to claim that much of my opinion of the book had already leaned to favorable with the knowledge that this was the last book to come out of saramago's hand.