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.
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| 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 21st
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.
Literature tells us, what to do, and what not to do, as it mirrors life. It has an aesthetic and ecosophical imperative, hidden within it. Aestethetic means at the level of contemplation, not on proof or disproof. Ecosophical, as Raimundo Panikkar would say, is about listening to the wisdom of the Mother Earth, beyond the ecological, which is about the human pretensions about how the Earth and our presumed knowledge about her. I gather that Robinson is about the aesthetic and the ecosophic... a-la the good pastor.
ReplyDeleteRobinson certainly is a wise writer and her wisdom comes from her religion. But to a non-Christian reader, the book can appear tedious with too many allusions to the Bible and Christian theology.
DeleteHari OM
ReplyDeleteNot a book that I would look at, probably - though it seems from, what you say that it explores quite deeply, albeit pretty much only within one particular faith system. Thanks for the precis, though. YAM xx
The book is a good read, no doubt. The religion in it notwithstanding, the novel can delight us with its sparkling insights into life.
DeleteLooks like an interesting book that discusses important aspects of the meaning and growth in life.
ReplyDeleteYes, but from an acutely Christian point of view.
DeleteSeems like an interesting read, adding to my list
ReplyDelete👍👍
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