Review: Robert Crumb's Book of Genesis

An iconic graphic artist’s depiction of the first book of the Bible is no comic but an inspiring as well as accessible work

Timely and timeless: Crumb’s images “a triumph of creativity”

By Robert Crumb
Jonathan Cape, £18.99

Robert Crumb is the Woody Allen of comics, a hero of the 1960s counter-culture who revelled in the portrayal of the agonies and ecstasies of his liberated libido, while displaying all the angst of Philip Roth’s Portnoy.

Who better then to wrestle with the book of Genesis and bring it startlingly to life? For Crumb, this is “a text so great and so strange that it lends itself readily to graphic depiction,” and he spent five years adapting all 50 chapters. His painstaking research never intrudes on the delights of the reading experience.

Like any great artist, it is the use Crumb makes of his sources that matters. Particularly inspired by Savina Teubal’s Sarah the Priestess, which he mentions in his notes, the author of My Troubles with Women here creates an extraordinary feminist retelling of the greatest story of all.

He places women at the heart of the narrative, as they attempt to shape individual and collective history, and astutely depicts the complex nature of gender and sexuality, from Adam and Eve’s joyful self-expression to the social machinations of the matriarchs. This is a very adult book for all the right reasons.

The precision of Crumb’s visual style amplifies key moments in the narrative. His mastery of characterisation, his ability to suggest inner conflict or passion with a few strokes, leads to some compelling insights. When Jacob wrestles “with a man all night,” the man bears his own face, and Jacob’s lameness thus becomes a symptom of a traumatic psychological struggle.

The haunting depiction of the devastated Esau, weeping at the loss of his birthright, anticipates the final tears in the book, when, after his father’s death, Joseph realises how much his brothers still fear his revenge, and he cries out: “I am not God, am I?”

Crumb intimates that it is precisely in this moment when he breaks down and his public composure crumbles that Joseph escapes the corrosive effects of power and recovers his humanity, empathising with those who once opposed and tried to kill him.

Most dramatically, Crumb conveys the relationship between humanity and God in all its intimacy and pathos. His Blakean, bearded deity embraces Adam as he forms him, and appears personally to Noah and Abraham. As time passes, this relationship grows more strained, and God becomes a voice, then a vision and, finally, a potent presence in dreams and memories.

Crumb’s images form an evocative counterpoint to Robert Alter’s sparkling contemporary translation together with iconic passages from the King James Bible, enabling the reader to experience, in T S Eliot’s phrase, “not just the pastness of the past, but its presence.”

Robert Crumb’s Genesis is a monumental work, a triumph of creativity and personal vision, both timely and timeless.

Ariel Kahn is a senior lecturer in creative writing at Roehampton University and contributor to ‘The Jewish Graphic Novel’