Samson - Softcover

Written with a brilliant disregard for the reputations of both Samson and God, Maine delivers a blistering and provocative portrait of someone more akin to God's own gangster than God's gift to mankind . . . Suffused with sex and violence, as well as many of the trapping of the modern thriller, this is Bible-bothering at its best. * * Time Out * * In retelling the life of Samson as every Sunday school's favourite mass murderer, he could not have made a more appropriate choice for our age . . .By fleshing out the story on its own terms, he conveys the amplitude of its moral horror. * * Guardian * *

Imprisoned by the Philistines, blind and chained, his hair shorn and his strength sapped, Samson's story is one of great feats of violence and even greater hubris. He believes that he has been sent by God to deliver his people from the heathens, and so strong is his conviction in his divine mission that his behaviour verges on the psychopathic. His delight in killing for God knows no bounds, and his Herculean speed and strength seems unstoppable, but then there's Dalila... In Samson's egomaniacal bloodlust Maine holds the mirror up to the actions of those running our world now, and in the suicidal bringing down of the twin pillars of the temple presages the defining event of the twenty-first century.