Gilead

Marilynne Robinson

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Review

Born in 1880 in Gilead, Iowa, the Reverend John Ames finds at the age of 76 that he has a life-threatening heart condition.  The prospect of dying grieves him because, having been a widower for over 50 years, he has recently remarried very happily and he has a seven-year-old son.  The book is constructed as a letter to his son, including information about the writer’s father, the previous preacher in Gilead, and his grandfather, a preacher ‘afire with old certainties’ who, after a vision of the Lord, came west to Kansas as a young man to ‘preach men into the Civil War’, in which he lost an eye.  The Reverend’s best friend is ‘old Boughton’, the local Presbyterian minister, who named his favourite child after his friend.  But John Ames Boughton is a black sheep, whose ‘transgressions were sly and lonely’, and Ames is increasingly anxious that this man will exert a malign influence on his wife and son after his death.

Volumes could be written on the theology of Gilead – and no doubt will be, now that it has won the Pulitzer - but the crucial point is that it works here because it is integral to the characterisation, which derives from the beauty and consistency of Ames’s voice.  The pace is that of an old man talking; the narrative frame captures someone who has lived all his life in one place, but read widely and thought deeply on spiritual matters.  The language is informal, elegant and precise; meaning is wrested from words so that the simplest statements are endowed with weight.

Time and again, exquisite observations and turns of phrase emerge. ‘This morning the world by moonlight seemed like an immemorial acquaintance I had always meant to befriend.’ ‘…that slight, brave look young trees have.’  The vitality of the language reflects directly on the narrator, and what is so startling and wonderful is that the vitality is the product, or at least an ally, of restraint rather than flashiness.  Just as Ames makes the world anew by the way he looks at ordinary things, so Robinson recharges language itself.  You get the feeling that she has been thinking about her character since she published her superb first novel, Housekeeping pbk £7.99, 25 years ago.

There are gems on every page, but it is the whole construction of Gilead that marks it as a great work of literature.  At one point Ames speculates that ‘the reaction of God to us might be thought of as aesthetic rather than morally judgmental in the ordinary sense’, inviting us to consider that a man’s goodness amounts to more than an accumulation of good actions.  Likewise, the achievement of this novel lies not just in the magnificence of individual aspects, but in its complete portrayal of a man – flawed, like all men, but not necessarily beyond redemption. -  adapted from my review in the Daily Telegraph - review by Johnny de Falbe