In the dust and the heat of high summer, kids are baptising kittens, rituals half-play, half-serious, already brushing against the sacred. The children of preacher men are learning their craft, feeling out the divine in the dust and heat of small-town Iowa. Long before pulpits beckon, something akin to destiny is already being tried on.
Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead is a story about fathers and sons and the human condition in all its fractal parts told through the prism of religion, old age and small-town life. In epistolary format the central character, Reverend John Ames, is reaching forward in time, recording tenderness, resentment, faith and doubt for a son he will not see grow old.
I spent last year chewing through weighty, American-centred books with male voices, skewed towards themes of solitude and the interiority of characters. Good books, but narrowing and I wanted something that dealt with family and that might help me ask quieter questions about my own father.
It prompted me to look again at tensions in my own family. Dad was an older parent and I felt it keenly as a kid. A couple of years ago there was a brief moment when I became a dad. On my way to work one morning I learned of fatherhood and loss in one message. I too would have been an older father. Would I have become more responsible? Less selfish? More driven to make things work with my partner? For the remainder of that journey to work I lived an entire lifetime with a child I would never see.
Gilead makes you question what a ‘settled’ life really looks like and posits the question: ‘How many of us look into the windows of other people, envious of their settled lives?’ I certainly have. This is one of the books subtle powers. It directs you to look at your own life and what might be missing but never preaches from a pulpit. A susurrus of religious sensibilities echoes throughout the text as Robinson deftly weaves scripture into the story but doesn’t require biblical knowledge to interpret.
I ran the risk of romanticising solitude in my reading last year. Reverend Ames quietly warns solitude can be ‘balm for loneliness’ but never a cure. Books and writing sustained him but love and family captured his heart. In Gilead, Robinson portrays an honest conversation between an old man and the son he will never see grow up. It succeeds most when Ames’ religious veil lifts and his vulnerabilities show through, but it falters a little when the story veers off into the more theological thickets of Calvinism and predestination. Can grace change a person's path?
Ultimately, Robinson casts the town, Gilead, as a key character which subtly drives and directs people’s lives. It’s a salient reminder of the power home towns have over our destinies and fates but she is also reminding us of the importance of community. I think we overlook the guiding hand our home towns play in our lives and perhaps the story is a gentle reminder to revisit memories of people and events from the past which have had profound effect on our lives. Ames writes because he cannot stay. I read because I cannot know. The story leaves me with an uncomfortable question: Is fatherhood the ultimate sacrifice and what kind of ‘settled’ life am I choosing by not having children?
by Tale_Blazer