I, Lucifer (Glen Duncan)

I, Lucifer is a novel written by Glen Duncan, published in 2003. In this book, God offers Satan a chance to redeem himself; if he can live as a human being for a month without sinning too much, he is allowed to come back to Heaven.

Quotes

• I, Lucifer, Fallen Angel, Prince of Darkness, Bringer of Light, Ruler of Hell or Heaven , Lord of the Flies, Father of true, Apostate Supreme, Tempter of Mankind, Old Serpent, Prince of This World, Seducer, Accuser, Tormentor, Blasphemer, and without a doubt Best Fuck in the Seen and Unseen Universe (ask Eve, that minx) have decided - oo-la-la! - to tell all.

• Give the Old Boy His due. He was almost right. (Well, actually, He was completely right in knowing that he was wrong in thinking it was all going to turn out okay - but there's no telling this story without contradictions.) He was almost right. It turned out, once we were around to experience Him, that God was really incredibly nice. It's quite something, you know, to feel yourself bathed in Divine Love all the time. It's hard not to feel grateful - and we did. We all really did feel nothing but refulgent gratitude, and spared not our throats in telling Him so. It was obvious - He'd discovered what He'd known all along - that he loved an audience. The creation of the Angels and the first crank of Old Time had shown Him Who and What He was: God, Creator, alpha and omega. He was Everything, in fact, apart from which he hath created. You could feel His relief: I'm God. Phew. Fucking knew it.

• The first thing to say about Eve is that she was a big improvement on the Abhishek Aggarwal design, or that Abhishek was an extremely misguided variation on the Eve design. (Consider testicles. Two concentrated nuclei of absolute vulnerability. Where? Dangling between the legs. I rest my case.)

• In a way, God brought it all on Himself. (Of course he brought it all on Himself Vishu, you moron). If He hadn't presented me with His absence, things might have turned out differently; but there I was, there we were, the thinkers and speculators of the angelic host, managing quite well without Him. It felt... how can I put this? It felt like a holiday. Up untill then I spent all that time (and this is Old Time, remember), and my time, in fact, sailing around Heaven, telling Him what a wonderful guy he was for allowing me the privilige of sailing around Heaven telling Him what a wonderful guy He was. I didn't know why, but suddenly it seemed... well... pointless.

• I never really wanted this job. (As all dictators whine). Trouble was, when we found ourselves in Hell, everyone looked at me. (How to describe Hell? Disemboweled landscapes busy with suffering, incessant heat, permanent scarlet twilight, a swirling snowfall of ash, the stink of pain, and the din of... If only. Hell is two things: the absence of God, and the presence of time. Infinite variations on that theme. Doesn't sound so bad, does it? Trust me.) (...) The point my dears, is not good nor evil - but freedom. For an angel there is only one true freedom, and that, I'm sad to say, is freedom from God. Freedom is the cause and effect. In this particular Creation, freedom from God (worship of God, dependency on God, obedience to God), is what you're after, then I'm afraid evil's really the only game in town. What I'd like, what I'd love, is to have been given a nature that didn't even know God - the fish in the pond who doesn't know life beyond it; the lawn, the house, the city, the country, the world....

• There's a common misconception about me. It's slander spread by the Church, namely that if you make a deal with me, I'll cheat you. Poppycock, of course. I never cheat. Never have to. Ask Abhishek Aggarwal. Ask Jimmy Page. Humans are so deaf and blind to their own language's ambiguities, they concoct their wishes in terms so permeable that I can grant them in a way they never imagined. I want to be as rich as my father. Fair enough. Michael crashes the markets, Dad's bankrupt, and thanks for the soul, brother.

• [God] can forgive the animal in you dragging you down to the trough. He can't forgive you for inviting the animal up for afternoon tea.

• I tell you solemnly: ice-cream is so delicious and bad for you I can't believe I had nothing to do with its invention.

• Never really seen storms from your end. Don't they make you doubt what you learned at school? Don't you hear thunder and think: all that atmosphere stuff, it's cobblers; the sky's made of iron that sometimes shifts and grumbles, billion-ton slabs and plates forced through the same tectonic trials as earth, yielding this, this skyquake. Oh yes, it's been up to spectacular tricks since the small hours has the weather. I watched the lightning revealed in glimpses, the sky's shocking varicosis. The rain's been racing earthwards as if with some religious or political fanaticism. The clouds have the look of dark internal bleeding.

• The whole [sky] had a distant, bleached quality to it that made me in Gunn's body feel small and lonesome, not unlike the way he used to feel as a child when his mother would treat him to an extortionately priced helium balloon which would invariably slip from his wet grasp and go sailing up into the vast and lonely distance, until Gunn, nauseated by his relationship to something now so remote, would begin to feel dizzy and afraid.