It’s an intensification of religious culture that I have seen, but even that’s perhaps a carry- over from an earlier kind of passion and selflessness and generosity of intention that could not keep its focus, that did not understand its implications.” The irony is that this is not sustainable over the long term – or at least not in the form in which they would have wished for it to persist.
Many of the abolitionist people were clergy, and they were profoundly religious people: it was at saturation level. The period I was writing about in those novels was the period most influenced by the abolitionist movement. “I’d be delighted to think that I’d done that,” Robinson replied, “or even approached it. And you’re going to keep me honest.” Was it Robinson’s intention from the beginning, Varden asked, to embody an honest articulation of faith and so preserve it from platitudinous certainties and preacherly vagueness? Ames says to the much younger Lila: “I’m going to keep you safe.
Varden plunged in, drawing our attention to a conversation between John Ames and his wife Lila in bed one Saturday night. Each focuses on the same group of characters, each one of them indelible in the memory all are members of the households of two Presbyterian ministers, Robert Boughton and John Ames, who grew up in the small Midwestern town of Gilead in the early twentieth century. The series begins with Gilead (2004), and continues with three further novels – Home (2008), Lila (2014) and Jack (2020). Their conversation – conducted between Marilynne Robinson’s sitting room in Saratoga Springs, New York, and Erik Varden’s study in Trondheim, in Norway – was one of the highlights of the Tablet Spring Festival last month.įr Erik began by admitting that, while greatly looking forward to the conversation, he had also been dreading it a bit: having lived with Robinson’s “Gilead” novels for the best part of 15 years, “having wept with them and laughed with them”, he hesitated to talk about them because they had come to stand for something so intimate. Both have a gift of making ordinary things numinous, of pointing “towards the light that no darkness can overcome”. Her novels are among the great works of American literature his The Shattering of Loneliness was one of the most acclaimed books of spirituality of recent years.
Here it is at last on CoramFratribus, too. The paper described our exchange as ‘not only a critic and a writer discussing themes in the Gilead series of novels, but two Christians in deep dialogue about some of the most compelling creations in contemporary literature.’ Maggie Fergusson, literary editor of The Tablet, subsequently wrote up parts of the conversation for the print edition of 1 July 2021. In May last year, as part of The Tablet’s spring festival, I was privileged to engage Marilynne Robinson in conversation.
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