Ruins of old courage and lore of old hope
Shirin Hasanat Islam is moved by a tale spun around a town
This novel by Marilynne Robinson, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005, is a first person narrative written in the form of a communiqué from an aged father to his very young son, whose adulthood he does not expect to see because of his advanced years. The novel is set in the in the American Midwest, in a small town bordering the vast prairie area which is both a landscape and a condition that colours the attitudes and responses of the characters in it. It is not a novel in the epistolary or letter form, yet the text divided into sections, which purportedly have been written over many days, addresses the boy, a child of seven, in an attempt to leave not only a memoir of his parent but also to explain and perhaps justify the life that that father has lived, a testament that he hopes the child will read when he is an adult. The intimate, contemplative, often introspective, tone of the book makes the reader almost an accidental bystander, even an eavesdropper. The speaker, Pastor John Ames, is a man of seventy six, who as he tells us has lived seventy four of those years in the imaginary small town of Gilead, in the state of Iowa. He has married his present wife very late in life, in his late sixties, and the child, he tells us repeatedly, has come as a miracle. He had lost his first wife, a childhood sweetheart, in childbirth, losing both wife and infant daughter, and for many decades has led a life of great loneliness. The speaker, being a religious figure by both vocation and tradition, the text is infused throughout with strong spiritual flavour. The tone is reflective and quiet, the language simple as well as informal. The speaker, who also suffers from a cardiac condition, knows he has little time left and not having been a worldly person has little to pass on to his son except a knowledge and an understanding of his roots and his heritage. The history of that heritage takes us from the American Civil War to the mid-1950s. In the Civil War Pastor Ames' grandfather, Reverend John Ames, took an unconventionally active martial role on the side of the abolitionists, which he saw as his inescapable moral duty but which was opposed and resented by his son, another Reverend Ames, who saw military activism as not only destructive but contrary to the Christian spirit. The second Reverend Ames lives through the First Great War and his anti-war convictions are further strengthened by witnessing the tragedies wrought by that conflict among his small community. The opposition between these two men, father and grandfather of the speaker, form a contrapuntal frame in which the first part of the narrative is played out. It should be pointed out here that the narration here is not an uninterrupted straightforward progression from past to present . Indeed, the rambling tone swings back and forth between the present as the speaker lives it, rejoicing in the presence of his son, to the past where he seeks not only to provide a familial perspective for that son but also to make some sense of how his own life has been shaped by his ancestors and their experiences and actions. The drama of family conflict evolves into the drama of conflicting spiritual codes with the narrator often a bemused witness, sympathetic on occasions, baffled on others at the inexplicability of human passions. Numerous episodes in the book can be quoted in support of this contention but two which to my mind stand out are the actions of the narrator's parents in disposing of the first Reverend Ames' belongings after his death --- an ancient pistol, which is first buried, then twice dug up, then broken into pieces, finally flung into the river; then his clothes, bloodstained and tattered, which the husband buries after a makeshift cleansing but which action the wife takes as an affront to her housewifely skills, digging up the ragged remnants, laundering them with great diligence, washing the stains out of the ancient garments as best as she could, starching and ironing them till they are fairly respectable and then burying them. The other episode relates to the inhabitants of a small town who dig a tunnel across a road in their zeal for their favourite occupation. The tunnel collapses when a stranger on a rather heavy horse stands on the wrong spot and the citizens are hard put to not only rescue the stranger and his horse but to save themselves the embarrassment stemming from their tunnel digging enthusiasms by sending him on his way with lavish compensations. Then failing to cover up the evidence of their impractical foolishness they are compelled to move the whole town further down the road. What I found remarkable is that funny as this story is - except an escaping slave who had been hidden by these no doubt kindly souls and who had been vastly entertained by witnessing the whole thing, none present, the town dwellers or the stranger on the horse, found any thing to laugh about. The latter part of the book concerns itself with Pastor Ames' godson, Jack Boughton, son of his lifelong friend and fellow pastor, Reverend Boughton, who throughout his life has been a source of much distress and disappointment not only to his family but also to Pastor Ames who had baptized him. From his early youth onwards his irreverence and rejection of conventional religious beliefs has made him an outsider in this congregation. But it is his callous treatment of the young girl he has an affair with and who gives birth to his daughter that, for Pastor Ames even more than his family, is a cardinal offence. For Pastor Ames in particular, his indifferent rejection of parental commitment and responsibilities is an unbearable reminder and an agonizing insult to the fatherhood that was so cruelly taken away from him. This bitterness and a wholly irrational sense pf personal affront colours his whole attitude to Jack and when Jack comes back to Gilead, Pastor Ames is deeply uneasy about his motives and afraid of the destructive influence and devious intentions that he feels might threaten his family. Even when Jack confides in him about his own marital problems he has entered a relationship with a coloured woman and fathered a child by her and is seeking both religious sanction and social approval (which her own family refuses) Pastor Ames is unable to rise above his apprehensions and give him the spiritual support he so desperately seeks. On the whole, this is a book to be read slowly, to be savoured with sympathy, The language is lyrical in its simplicity, often verging on the poetic in its descriptions of place and people. It does not offer excitement of the conventional kind with actions and incidents following one after another. The drama of the book is on the internal level in its embracing of the human condition, in its understanding and acceptance of human deficiency and weakness. At the end when Pastor Ames tells his son that all he can leave as a legacy is "the ruins of old courage and the lore of old gallantry and hope" we have to disagree for what has been offered is the saga of a gentle life that has been good in the most basic and moving sense of the word. He finally feels "at home in the world" as he has never been able to do. The balm of Gilead has spread itself over his soul, and in so doing, over ours.
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