Gilead: A Christian Novel

 

Book Review

This novel consists of the reflections of a 76-year-old Congregationalist minister (a Christian priest, for those who are not familiar with the Christian denominations). His days are numbered due to an illness, and he wants to leave something by which his 7-year-old son will remember him when the latter grows up. This novel is his diary written for his son.

John Ames, the minister, was born in 1880. His life has been a witness to the essentially tragic nature of human life: “the droughts and the influenza and the Depression and three terrible wars.” How do we make sense of so much evil? John Ames has been delivering sermons every week for 45 years to help people discover not just meaning but the very joy and beauty of life. He has kept the texts of all those sermons which would be equal to some 225 books – “which puts (him) up there with Augustine and Calvin for quantity.” He wrote all of them “in the deepest hope and conviction.” But today, when he looks back at them as an old man, he is not sure of their worth. He would like his wife to burn them after his death.

No, he is not denying anything of what he preached. He is a firm believer in God’s love and justice. His sermons have tried to convey that love and justice and hence they are valid at any time. But “the sacred beauty of Creation becomes dazzlingly apparent” when we feel our moral insufficiency to the world and when we feel the world’s moral insufficiency. There is something insufficient in his sermons, obviously.

The novel is a profound contemplation on human life rooted firmly in the Bible and Christian theology. But the atheist-philosopher Feuerbach also appears intermittently with his cheerfulness. John Ames loves Feuerbach so much that his wife wanted to name their cat after the philosopher.

There is much philosophy too in the novel. But theology overrides everything else. Jesus asked his followers to be like children. What did he mean? “I take Him to mean,” says John Ames, “you must be stripped of all the accretions of smugness and pretense and triviality.” The reader will come across such questions and answers again and again. For the non-believer, it is philosophy. For Ames, it is theology.

What makes the book a novel rather than a book of meditation are its fascinating characters like Ames’s father and grandfather, both ministers themselves. One was a pacifist and the other an abolitionist. The grandfather had lost an eye during the Civil War and he stares right into your heart with the one eye that is left. The father is an equally domineering character.

Marilynne Robinson

 The villainous character, however, is Jack Boughton who was named after John Ames. Jack’s real name is John Ames Boughton. But he is the reverse of the minister. He does not believe in God. “I don’t even believe God doesn’t exist,” he says. What makes him a villain is not his disbelief but the hollowness of his character, his inability to love, inability to discover the joy of existence. But the novel leaves him with the promise of redemption.

Redemption of the human soul is the central concern of the novel. Divine grace plays a central role in that process, according to the novel’s worldview. Like love and forgiveness, divine grace too is a gift that some people receive and some don’t. The prodigal son was forgiven though he had not expressed repentance for the grief he caused to his father. The father’s forgiveness is a gift. Like the divine grace. We should forgive others too. It is then that we become God’s collaborators and also “restore ourselves to ourselves.”

Love, joy of life, forgiveness… Such themes which draw their sustenance from the Bible and Calvin make the novel highly religious. Those who can appreciate that aspect will find this a highly rewarding book. The diction has the tang of a soothing breeze. That is a bonus.

I bought this book after seeing it listed among the 100 best novels of the 21^st century by both The Guardian and the BBC. It is also one of the favourites of Barack Obama. It also won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005, the year after its publication.