Gilead

This book, a masterful novel by Marilynne Robinson, was recommended to me a couple of years ago by one of the internet's greatest humans in a short video discussing his favourite books. The title lodged itself in my head, and though I never sought it out to buy it, I nipped into a charity shop the day after I finished exams last week, and Ze Frank's approval ghosted me as I browsed the bookshelf so I ended up acquiring it. It's truly an astoundingly beautiful work of fiction, one of those ones which I'd like to reread in a single sitting someday - partly to revisit characters who I have come to know better than many real people, but also just to take it in more fully.

   The novel takes the form of an extended series of notes, written in 1956 by John Ames, an elderly pastor, to his seven-year-old son, whom he wants to leave with a breadth and depth of fatherly wisdom after his impending departure. Everything is perfectly written; as if by John Ames himself, possibly the most real fictional person I've ever known, such is the consistency of voice and character laid out in his pages. The notes range from theological insights, meditations on meanings and truths, anecdotal observations of the son himself and others; Ames's old friend Boughton and his family, Ames's late first wife and child and his unexpected new marriage to a godly younger woman, Ames's father and grandfather who had been pastors there before him and his atheist brother Edward whose influence, quirks and deeds resound throughout, Boughton's son Jack to whom Ames is a second father, and most pervasively the dry tiny Iowa town of Gilead itself. John Ames's relationship with Jack Boughton is the most conflicted stream of development in the book, and through rememberings and newly recorded events we are given moving glimpses into the similarly real life of the narrator's "son".* It is an enormously gripping book, despite the protagonist being very much a good, peaceful man, and not much happening in the present of his writing. However, John Ames's discourses of varying length are unceasingly strewn with nuggets of wisdom, bound by a constancy of faith in truth and goodness, often probing and questioning and hoping and regretting but always from the clear eloquent view of an old man whose entire life is, and always has been, in Gilead, and in God. It leaves you with an astounding awareness of the beauty of grace and forgiveness, and how these are fundamental moral components of any human's life if they are to have peace and similarly any relationship if it is to be good.

   I cannot fully give the impression of his voice, or his life, which together in being so real as fiction comprise the novel. It reminds me of another book I read last year which was similar in depth and tone, but this is far more uplifting, less linear, more meaningful and encouraging, more full of love and humanity and rightness. It's actually kind of made me worried as it's the first fiction I've read in 2015 and it's highly improbable that anything else will match up now. Anyway, whoever you are, read it; keep your heart open and as you meet Jack Boughton, several generations of townsfolk in Gilead, an attic full of unread sermons, and the eye-leakingly personal John Ames himself; you will be engrossed by this novel and it will sadden and gladden you to finish.

* Apparently, this relationship between Jack Boughton and John Ames is explored from the other's perspective in another of Marilynne Robinson's novels, which since having found this out I intend to acquire and read posthaste.