How do you follow a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel? Our Book Club considers Marilynne Robinson's return to 1950s America
VIVIAN FRENCH (VF) In the Edinburgh-based author of over 200 children's books, including the Tiara Club series, which has sold 2.5 million copies worldwide.
MARC LAMBERT (ML) is CEO of Scottish Book Trust, the national agency committed to the
promotion of reading and writing.
HANNAH McGILL (HM) is artistic director of the Edinburgh Film Festival, and a former TV and film critic for The Scotsman and the Herald.
LEE RANDALL (LR) is a columnist, interviewer, reviewer and assistant editor (magazines and arts) for The Scotsman. She is a former editor of Scotland on Sunday's Spectrum magazine.
DAVID ROBINSON (DR) is books editor of The Scotsman. His first book, In Cold Ink, is the 20,037th best-selling book in Britain.
The panel was also joined by BARBARA SLATER (BS) who won last month's Book Club readers' competition. She lives in Stirling, where she is an enthusiastic member of her local book club.
DR: THIS MONTH'S CHOICE – Home, by Marilynne Robinson – is a rather difficult one, because my guess is that whether you enjoy it or not depends heavily on whether you've read her last novel, Gilead, which won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize. Both novels are set at the same time, and have largely the same characters. Yet while we might find ourselves talking about both, we're really here to find out if Home works in its own right.
Gilead tells the story of the Reverend John Ames, an elderly pastor in small-town Iowa in 1956, married to a young wife, with whom he has a seven-year-old son. His heart is weak, he knows he isn't long for this world, and he spends his last days writing to his son. Robinson shows how Ames's spiritual faith suffuses his view of the world. Faith makes him revel in life's casual beauty, links him to his father and grandfather (both pastors too, one a leading abolitionist in the American civil war), and provides lessons from his life which he wants to pass on to his son.
But – and this is where the novel interlocks with Home – Rev Ames is increasingly unnerved by the growing friendship between Jack (the wastrel son of his best friend, Rev Boughton) and his wife and young son. Jack left the town of Gilead 20 years ago after getting a local girl pregnant. He abandoned her, and stayed away, even when his mother was dying. Now he's back home, where his sister, Glory, in her mid-thirties and long ago disappointed in love, is looking after their increasingly decrepit father.
My own position is simple. Gilead is easily the best book I've ever read for our book group, as clearly a classic as, say, Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd. If you can imagine Hardy then going on to write another novel from Bathsheba's point of view, or Sergeant Troy's, but with the same unities of place, time and character as the first book, that's how Home stands in relation to Gilead. But here's the key question: Is it enough?
BS: I think so. She's a very clever writer, and these are completely different stories. I think Home is beautifully written, poignant, intense, gladdening and saddening. It was a good read, with loads of dialogue, which I thought was credible and genuine and added to the pace of the narrative.
HM: To me, it feels a bit of a cheat that she's just taken the same story and looked at it from another angle. I think Gilead is the better book – it relies on a degree of suspense regarding the true nature of the characters' relationships, which is broached if you read Home first.
The beauty of Gilead was the tension between the Rev Ames's great faith and Jack's motives. And in Home there wasn't that same disjunction between faith and those very human qualities such as jealousy.
LR: And if you read Home first, important strands of the plot – like how Jack had got the local girl pregnant – are casually alluded to rather than explained for a fresh readership. I don't think it does stand alone. Gilead, however, does – or rather, it towers. It still arouses a great reverie in me, the kind of book that makes you happy to be alive. Whereas Home is far sadder, permeated with a sense of fate that's not entirely uplifting.
VF: I actually read Home before reading Gilead – I wanted to see if it would stand alone. I think it does, but I'm not entirely certain I'd have finished it if I hadn't felt obliged to do so.
It reminded me of a painting being built up with the tiniest of brush strokes – each layer of thought and reflection is set down, then added to, then expanded and considered before being added to again.
I was certain I knew how the story would end as soon as Jack was introduced, and I was right; there was a terrible bleak inevitability about the situation that haunted me for some time after.
ML: Well, you're all going to hate me, because I loathed this book. It tortured me with boredom, and didn't make me want to read Gilead. I found it one of the most excruciating reading experiences.
It was depressive, repetitive, and Marilynne Robinson seemed to want the story to bear the weight of a significance it just couldn't reach in terms of what it was saying, or the psychological depth of her characters which was, to me, zero. The most interesting character is Jack, the prodigal son, yet we know nothing about his interior life. The endless quasi-conversations he has with his sister don't go anywhere. They circle round each other, always saying sorry, meanwhile their father is a complete monster. I didn't have any sympathy with any of the characters – in fact I just wanted to leap into the novel and machine-gun them. Sorry!
DR: "Monster" is overegging it, surely, for Rev Boughton.
ML: He's racist, he's …
LR: He's a reactionary old midwesterner in the 1950s …
ML: He's racist because of the moral blindness brought about by the complete surrender of his intellect to his religion. And the whole book is also a portrait of a community which lives entirely by faith – by willed, collective delusion.
HM: So you think all the characters Marilynne Robinson shows as acting in good faith are really acting in bad faith?
ML: Yes – very much so.
HM: You might be underestimating her ironic distance from them.
ML: Perhaps, but I hated this book's religious ideology. It's deeply suspect. I can imagine this book being George W Bush's favourite bedtime reading – a political- religious credo that dignifies everything that is held dear by the religious Right, a novel about good plain folk who are the moral centre of America. To me, the last sentence of the book – "The Lord is wonderful" – might just as well be "God bless America."
DR: That's just you being anti-clerical.
LR: And it's odd, because I reject religiosity, but I absolutely enjoyed this book, just the same as I can read a book about drug dealers even though I don't do drugs. My enjoyment of the book depends on how vividly the author conveys different ways of being. And those pernicious attitudes to race – people who believed them were not necessarily bad people. It was only the age they lived in.
ML: It's just that novels with this kind of rationalisation about religious life drive me round the bend.
HM: So you can't read Dante or Milton or …
ML: Dante or Milton don't rationalise, they dramatise. And that doesn't happen here.
HM: But reading them requires an understanding of the intensity of those beliefs in another world. Surely there are whole swathes of literature that you can't engage with unless you understand the intensity and force with which someone can believe in the afterlife or the threat of hell.
ML: I agree, but the duty of the author is to make that drama come alive. And that just doesn't happen here. The writing just isn't good enough.
DR, LR, BS: Yes it is!
ML: There's no ambiguity or sophistication in it. It relentlessly focuses on detail ...
BS: I don't agree. This is quite a big book and most things in it happen in a short space of time, which goes to show how intense it is. There's so much dialogue and usually that does my head in, but I really believed in the characters.
Yet for all that there's so little communication; even though it's called Home, both Jack and his sister Glory are so much adrift of what home is meant to be ...
LR: And there's that ring of truth about family conversations, when it's so important that family members don't offend each other when they're back under the same roof; it's absolutely realistic.
VF: It is pretty bleak, though, which probably explains why I stopped to read Armistead Maupin halfway through because I needed an antidote. There's a real density in the writing.
I didn't feel much connection with the characters. I'm a fan of Eudora Welty, and I'd say that Marilynne Robinson is on the same trajectory, but without the warmth – and I missed that. Whereas with Jack and Glory and Rev Boughton, I felt they were in a world of their own that I wasn't allowed to enter – only to observe, and to analyse their situation and feelings.
HM: I found the people convincing. I believed in them. I do think, though, that she's fallen too much in love with these characters to give them any real darkness. And I know it's a 1950s period piece, but there's a remarkable old-fashionedness about her writing, an evasiveness about the uglier side of people, a backing away from sex and violence.
Instead, everyone's a suffering angel, even Bad Jack. And while I don't want to give away the ending, I think it would be a lot more realistic and true to Glory's character if it were harder-edged.
DR: I must say, my reading of Home is the absolute opposite to Marc's. I don't see ideology in it, but tragedy and pathos; I don't see stereotypes, but convincingly realised characters.
But I would say – I'd absolutely insist – that you don't read it without reading Gilead first, because I'm not sure that it does stand completely on its own.
LR: Bottom line – this is a better book if you've read Gilead and a worse one if you haven't. Agreed?
The full article contains 1775 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
