Satan Repentant, by Michael Aiken: devil and the deep blue sea

Michael Aiken’s work is closer to the comic-book universe than William Blake’s Romanti­c-era cosmology.

Lucifer, as played by Tom Ellis on Foxtel, has taken up residence in Los Angeles.

John Milton, Christopher Marlowe, Willia­m Blake: these are the names that come to mind on first encountering Satan Repentant, the extraordinary book-length poem by Australian writer Michael Aiken. Those earlier figures are remem­bered, in part, for their radical interpretation of the relationship between the official trintitarianism of the Christian church — the doctrine that God exists as three persons (Fathe­r, Son and Holy Ghost) but as one being — and the Gnostic idea that our world was in fact created by a lesser god, an evil and ­capricious Old Testament demiurge, wholly distinct from the kindly Jesus of the Gospels.

If this was just a question of early modern theological hair-splitting, Paradise Lost or Doctor­ Faustus would be unread period pieces today. But what these works ventured to do was make sense of the existence of evil in a world apparently governed by an all-powerful deity. They also asked whether the intelligence that allowed us to intuit this fracture at the heart of the Christian worldview was evidence of fallen-ness or grace.

For these rebels of the imagination, human knowledge was the ambivalent virtue of our species. It gave us access to the supernatural world beyond our physical habitude. For some Gnostics, indeed, it was Jesus who moved the serpent to encourage Eve and Adam to eat from the tree of knowledge, and thus begin undoing the spiritual totalitarianism of a wicked God.

As these ideas fed into the narratives of poets and natural philosophers of the Renaissance and beyond, the indivisible Trinity of the church was split and individual agents of the empyrean began to come into conflict. The result­s have included some of the most remarkable and searching works of the Western canon, from Dante’s Divine Comedy to Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. Writer Neil Gaiman contributed to the television serie­s Lucifer, in which the devil (Tom Ellis) takes up residence in Los Angeles and becomes a police consultan­t. The character was first created by Gaiman and others for DC Comics.

Satan Repentant is a recapitulation of these old battles with vernacular flourishes and a filmic vision: you could imagine the poem being rendered on an IMAX screen via CGI. And yet, for the most part it adheres to traditional epic blank verse conventions.

Divided into five parts with an ‘‘argument’’ at the beginning of each, setting out the narrative terms for the section to follow, the poetry unfold­s in stanzas of shifting metricality that favour occasional internal rhymes, intermittent free verse-style breakage of the line and a gener­al avoidance of couplets.

Here is an example from Satan, who has at the poem’s outset won an audience with God. His reason for doing so, after eons of mutinousness? To repent.

“I have offended my own love for you’’ (at

This his mouth was burned, the lingering malignancy,

His eternal nature, not yet shaken from his lips).

‘‘I do not ask elevation, not rescue

From Hell; I do not ask absolution.

But, father, please,

allow me to no longer be

the Enemy of everything. A slave

in the inferno is a kinder thing

than to be its king: perverse,

hurt and hurting.’’

This is not Milton’s Satan from Paradise Lost, a figure so closely associated with Hell that he is inextricably bound to the region, but something closer to a free agent. It is Beelzebub, a brutish pig-demon, the ‘‘lord of flies’’, who sits on the throne down below. Satan has lost his appetite for power and grown weary of rebellion against his creator. So it is that the fallen angel makes his request for minimal clemency from God.

God exacts a suitably high price in return. He asks that Satan submit himself to earthly existence: to become a human and so subject to our slender mortal frame, delimited by time, dimin­ished in perspective. There he is to live out, again and again, with only a dim sensation of his former existence, the ordinary joys and terrors of birth, life, death. ‘‘What say you?’’ asks God, finally, and Satan, having been flayed and physically ruined by the other demons of hell in the interim, as punishment for his abandonment of Hell, replies in the ironic affirmative:

‘‘I may be naive to mortal suffering

But I have known far worse than you. If I

survive what you barely imagine

then I can manage this.’’

The remainder of the poem unfolds according to the logic of Satan’s decision. He is thrown back into the world, a child with some residual strangeness but otherwise entirely of his kind. A dutiful son to mortal parents, grounded in some suburban street. We readers, privy to Satan’s thoughts, know that he has taken these steps in utmost sincerity.

Neither the angelic host above nor the demon hordes below are so sanguine about his motives, however. Beelzebub sends demons to break him, or tempt him away from faith in human community, while the archangel Raphae­l plots to reveal Satan’s true, Luciferian nature.

Yet even the child, bereft of full knowledge of his former power, remains firm against all comers­. On discovering two rough sleepers on his way home from school, disguised angels pretending­ all manner of vileness, he lets rip:

‘‘ … Stupid monsters,

your illusion reveals

the clamouring in your hearts. I am

not humiliated, except by choosing to.

You are nothing

like me

you have nothing

I would want. Be gone. My mind

is its own kingdom

and you are not invited.’’

In part, then, the poem becomes a humanist critique of those claims made on earthbound types by supernatural religion. These arrogant ukases, whether issuing from Heaven or Hades, are shown to be petty and mean, and concerned with narrow partisan squabble as much as some final moral horizon; they could well be drawn from our contemporary political class.

Meanwhile, the awful diet that Beelzebub subsists on and draws his power from is made directly from Earthly evils — animal cruelty or environmental degradation — which suggest we may not be wholly blameless in these extraterrestrial matters. ‘‘Torture,’’ admits Satan, ‘‘evolved with the opposable thumb.’’

Satan Repentant turns out to be a poem of visceral excitements, of battle scenes and grandstanding rhetoric and philosophical radicalism. It holds a cast of thousands and features the eventual destruction of most life on Earth.

In this regard, Aiken’s work is closer to the comic-book universe than William Blake’s romanti­c-era cosmology. If not, that is, for the highfalutin diction and the five-dollar words — ‘‘conturpation’’, ‘‘paraspeudologies’’, ‘‘com­bob­ulat­e’’ — thrown up against hackneyed, grammatically questionable or simply unrefined­ five-cent phrases as ‘‘what the f..k?’’, ‘‘I did good’’, and ‘‘Stockholm syndrome’’.

If the incongruity of registers jars, this is intend­ed. The frisson of what might otherwise been an exercise in mannered poetic antiquar­ianism derives from this slamming together of conservative form and traditional subject-­matter, and a very modern interest in individual psychology and the point where humanism begins­ to break down as a legitimate measure of our moment.

Milton’s Satan was a rebel against Christianity at a point where a totalising religious system was being supplanted by a secular political and social structure.

At the darkest corners of this ambitious, sometimes flawed, yet never un­interesting exercise, Aiken’s Satan suggests the time for a rebellion against the lazier and self-aggrandising assumptions baked into the Humanis­t model has now come. It is time for someone — or something — to give voice instead­: “Lucifer gathered what was left, and invite­ a language to speak of itself.’’

Geordie Williamson is The Australian’s chief literary critic.

Satan Repentant

By Michael Aiken

UWAP, 140pp, $22.99