The legacy of Cain is murder. It is the attempt to kill the accusing image of God within us and re-create the world in the image of the desires we mistake for ourselves.

The novelist Andrew Klavan has morphed himself (in between writing marvelous mystery stories) into a philosopher of art in recent years. His book The Truth and Beauty examined the English Romantic poets, linking their artistic strivings to the search for God. I loved that book, but had trouble understanding its ultimate point. This led me to do some theorizing of my own (I’ve posted some of my thoughts on this blog). Klavan’s latest book, The Kingdom of Cain, suggests to me that I’ve been generally on the right track.

Andrew Klavan has often mentioned wryly that one of his great fears, when he became a Christian, was that he’d become a Christian writer – the kind of writer who tells stories about a little girl who prays that God will help her find her bunny rabbit, and God obliges. Instead, he has made his uneasy way working at his proper craft, writing the kind of stories he cares about and suffering the criticism of those readers who want bunny stories.

So this book begins as a sort of apologia for realistic (even earthy) Christian fiction – an issue that matters to me as well, in my humble way. Can depictions of the darkness of life – the ugly things that evil, twisted men do to each other and to the innocent – serve to glorify God?

Klavan thinks they can.

He starts out with the ancient, original murder – that of Cain upon Abel. He describes how the spirit of Cain has passed down through history to find full expression in post-Christian thinkers and psychologists – men like Nietzsche and Freud – and de Sade. How Dostoevsky pondered such ideas, found them wanting, and brought forth brilliant, moral works of art – Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov. He describes the crimes of a nondescript Wisconsin psychopath named Ed Gien, whose hideous career inspired “Psycho,” “The Silence of the Lambs,” and a score of inferior knock-offs.

Then he ponders the mysteries of creation, the fall of Man, and redemption. The book ends in a vision of what the author considers possibly the greatest work of human art – Michelangelo’s “Pieta,” an achievement that contemplates what Christians consider the greatest crime of all time – the greatest crime possible – and transforms it into sublime beauty.

Here, he suggests, is an answer to the mystery of Theodicy, the question how a good God could permit evil. The answer, Klavan suggests, cannot be parsed in logic or spoken in words. Only Beauty, a gleam of light from Heaven received by the soul, can provide answers for those who have eyes to see.

But read The Kingdom of Cain for yourself. I’m certainly going to read it again. I experienced genuine physical thrills as I followed its line of thought.