As a reminder, every fortnight Manders, Laura and I will be reviewing a section from Marilynne Robinson’s second and Pultizer Prize winning novel, Gilead, which you can buy here. Here is my first review.
*****
There is a peaceful melancholy tone about Gilead, one which flows out of a narrator who is so unlike so many earlier protagonistics — angsty, confused, and lost. John Ames’ voice is full of wonder and yet tinged with sadness; for instance he writes of his ‘dark time’ (like which in any story we might tell we refer and circle around to things our reader might not fully know) and the way ‘in all that deep darkness a miracle was preparing’ (63); he writes to his son of going to church in the middle of the night to pray for people, where the floorboards would give under his weight rather than creaking. But he ends these reflections with: ‘I know they’re planning to pul it [the church] down. They’re waiting me out, which is kind of them’ (80). It is peacefully melancholy because he is, I’d wager, one of the few contemporary protagonists who although he is quite sad to think about giving up his humanity, he is satisfied in it as well.
Yet as John Ames circles around his past in order to narrate it in the form of a letter to his young son — Ames calls the project, quite biblically, his son’s ‘begats’ — he inevitably moves back and forth between his current life and the miraculous in it (his own childhood wonder in his 70s at his hands and feet each morning and the miracle his wife and child in his old age are to him) to his own childhood, particularly returning again to his father and his grandfather, also two ministers, with quite different political views. Ames, by opening up his own life, by not afraid to tell his young son of his own foolishness, seeks to prevent some of the relational scarring that is as much a part of his son’s ‘begats’ as the actual genealogy. For the remainder of this review, I’d like to simply look at one passage as that which encapsulates much of this triangle of fathers and sons. Ames writes:
So I was predisposed to believe that my grandfather had done something pretty terrible and my father was concealing the evidence and I was in on the secret, too — implicated without knowing what I was implicated in. Well, that’s the human condition, I suppose. I believe I was implicated and am, and would have been if I had never seen that pistol. It has been my experience that guilt can urst through the smallest breach and cover the landscape, and abide in it in pools and danknesses, just as native as water. I believe my faither was trying to cover up for Cain, more or less. The things that happened in Kansas lay behind it alll, as I knew at the time (93).
Ames’ grandfather, travelled from Maine to Kansas in efforts to make the state, upon entrance into the Union, free rather than slave and ‘preached men into the Civil War’, while Ames’ father, was an ardent pacifist. Ames’ father had opened his father’s bundle of army blankets containing his weather-beaten sermons and letters, tattered and bloody shirts and a pistol used when he was a chaplain in the Civil War. This pistol, probably symbolising all that disconnected father and son, was buried twice and finally thrown into the river.
Yet, rather than focus on the immediacy of the father-son relationship, rather than didactically explaining his father and grandfather all in one go, Ames, like Jesus in his parables, tells a story — a glimpse that exposes the human condition, that we are all in fact trying to cover up for Cain. It is not just that Ames’ grandfather has killed as Cain had committed the first shedding of blood, but also that we are both condemned for our guilt and simultaneoulsy work to try to cover it up. Guilt — and sin generally — hides in the landscape, ‘just as native as water’. Earlier Ames had reflected on water being formed primarily for blessing — not just for sacramental purposes but for the blessing he observed in a young couple laughing under the cloud of raindrops fallen from a tree. The landscape — whether it’s Gilead, Iowa or the heat of Kansas — inhabits the blessing and the curse of creation in the ‘pools and danknesses’ and blessings of water.
But Robinson’s language is never forced; preceding this paragraph excerpted above, he speaks of seeing a photograph of his grandfather: ‘a wild-haired, one-eyed, scrawny old fellow’ (93), and follows the paragraph with a return to an earlier story about childhood fear about an unknown murderer. Thought follows thought in a meandering reflective, but not quite nostalgic, looking backwards. It is as sure as a list of ‘begats’. Ames’ narration is consistently humble, elegant and truthful; he is simply trying to open up his life — both the incidents and the style — to his son who will only remember him as alternately a father and an old man. Gilead has little treasures all the way through, pieces on which to reflect, savour, smile at and realise the import of only after you take time to pause and soak in a life that is embedded in the ‘pools and danknesseses’ as much as it is in the laughter elicited by blessing. Ames, in theological language, is simultaneously a saint and sinner; in fictional language, he is our reliable narrator.
