Fiction: A father addresses the man his small son will one day become. But the father, already old, knows he will not live to see his boy grown.
Wise and affectionate, kindly and honest, Rev John Ames speaks to his son in the form of a letter, a book, which the child, when a man, will, in time, read.
It is a parent's statement, shaped by love, concern and family history. The old man's narrative is informed by all the experience, regrets and pleasure of life recalled in the shadow of approaching death.
Some 23 years after the publication of Housekeeping, her Pulitzer Prize-winning debut, US writer Marilynne Robinson has published her second novel, Gilead, a work of beauty and humanity. This year's winner of the Pilitzer Prize and the US National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, it dazzled American reviewers on its publication at Christmas and quickly became a bestseller. While the literary establishment praised its achievement, the wider US reading public has embraced it as a moral, humane story that America needed.
Now, with its London publication, Gilead (taking its title from the biblical "balm of Gilead") is set to inspire more readers. Rarely has a novel as loving, as subtle and as gentle delivered such a powerful polemic about the legacy of war and its lasting divisions. If ever there was a novel capable of making us read, think, feel and remember, it is this long-awaited book from a writer whose silence during the past two decades has been broken only by two volumes of non-fiction. Robinson is a thinker who examines life and living with the instincts of a natural philosopher.
In Rev John Ames Robinson has created a narrator worthy of her gifts. He is a man delighting in belated fatherhood. Having married for the second time in his late 60s (many years after his first wife died in childbirth, taking with her their infant daughter), he is now aged 76. He can tell his son that had his first child, his son's sister, lived, she would now be 51, 10 years older than the boy's mother. For Ames, a man in love with being alive and with watching the world about him, much of his life has been far lonelier than he would ever admit. Neither a complainer nor a solitary, he has found comfort in a boyhood friendship that has lasted into old age. His friend, Boughton, had tried to help Ames deal with the early loss of his first wife and child by naming one of his children John Ames in his honour.
"I told you last night that I might be gone sometime, and you said, Where, and I said, To be with the Good Lord, and you said, Why, and I said, Because I'm old, and you said, I don't think you're old. And you put your hand in my hand and you said, You aren't very old, as if that settled it," begins Ames.
In this opening exchange, in which the narrator catches the innocence of his small son's questions as well as the boy's certainty, the old man reveals much of his character. He is kindly and instantly sympathetic, with a feeling for language that is both formal and plain-speaking. Ames represents an America that is traditional, simple, more hopeful: "If you're a grown man when you read this - it is my intention for this letter that you will read it then - I'll have been gone a long time. I'll know most of what there is to know about being dead, but I'll probably keep it to myself. That seems to be the way of things."
The naturalness of the narrative voice, speaking to a child for whom the father is aware he may have become merely a distant memory, balances the profundity of what he is saying. He is considering the notion of existence. Ames, as he faces a death he would rather postpone until his child is a good deal older, outlines the questions a pastor is expected to answer: "I don't know how many times people have asked me what death is like, sometimes when they were only an hour or two from finding out for themselves."
In attempting to help his son discover the man he, his father, was, Ames admits to having not felt "very much at home in the world . . . Now I do". Years of solitude rendered him no more than a witness to the lives of others.
"I do regret that I have almost nothing to leave you and your mother," he writes. "A few old books no one else would want. I never made any money to speak of, and I never paid any attention to the money I had."
Robinson has avoided many of the traps such a novel could so easily have fallen into. There is no wodge of superfluous detail. He doesn't need to dwell at length upon his wife, the boy's mother, as the son will have a chance to know her through his own experience.
Ames's tone is conversational, though deliberate; this is a man used to preaching but also accustomed to listening and to being a friend. He has an objective, to supply a history, and concentrates on telling his boy the story of his own family: "My mother's father was a preacher, and my father's father was, too and his father before him, and before that, nobody knows, but I wouldn't hesitate to guess."
He recalls his younger self, a boy watching the drama of his father's relationship with his father, the narrator's grandfather, a man of God who nonetheless "preached men into the Civil War". That old man - who had lost an eye, but instead of lamenting it, praised the Lord for the one he kept - believed he had seen God in a vision and so left Maine and travelled to Kansas to fight for the abolition of slavery.
The dying Ames wants his small son in time to understand the tensions that divided his father and grandfather, his son's grandfather and great-grandfather, the same tensions that divided America. Set in Gilead, an invented town in Iowa, the Midwest heartland, this is a novel about a divided America as much as a divided family.
In the course of the narrative, Ames records the everyday textures of the life he is preparing, albeit reluctantly, to leave, and the simple pleasures he loves: "Your mother is wearing her blue dress and you are wearing your red shirt", and they are playing with the family cat. Ames also explains darker realities about relationships in his experience as a witness to the trials of his troubled namesake, John Ames Boughton.
This is a book about a leave-taking. "I'm trying to make the best of our situation. That is, I'm trying to tell you things I might never have thought to tell you if I had brought you up myself, father and son, in the usual companionable way. When things are taking their ordinary course, it is hard to remember what matters."
Ames describes what being a father means to him, and he also recalls what being a son was like. "The fact is," he writes, "I don't want to be old. And I certainly don't want to be dead . . . I bitterly wish you could know me as a young man . . ."
Ames has watched and thought all his life. "Existence is the essential thing," he tells his son, just as Robinson informs her readers. Gilead is a miraculous book of truths. Robinson's achievement lies in her honest, unsentimental exploration of a man seeking to provide his son with comfort from the grave, while a divided nation unites in seeking answers.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
Gilead By Marilynne Robinson Virago, 282pp. £14.99
