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Home

Shelf life: Looking at secular books

HOME
By Marilynne Robinson
Virago. £7.99
ISBN 978-1-84408-550-7

‘Utterly haunting’, ‘profound and moving’, ‘exquisitely measured’, say the critics.

Orange prize winner 2009, Home is a companion piece to Robinson’s Gilead, which won the Pulitzer Prize five years ago. It is set in 1940s Gilead, a fictional mid-western town, but focuses on the family of the Rev. Boughton, rather than the Rev. Ames. In this way Robinson explores from a very different perspective, and thus with a different tone, the history and attitudes of small town religious folk.

This book describes a family which has been so moulded by the Word of God that their very cadences come from King James, and it is also a story which has at its heart Bible concerns. Glory has returned home, after a long, unsatisfactory love affair, to care for her father, a Presbyterian minister in the small town of Gilead. She is joined in this home, so full of memories, by her brother Jack, the prodigal of the family. The themes of the book are bound up in the story of the prodigal son: rebellion, repentance, predestination, and the relationship of suffering and love.

I am known to stay up far too late reading on occasion, but this book didn’t keep me up, not because it is not exceedingly well written, but because it demanded to be read slowly and savoured. Sentences are crafted with great simplicity to show the domestic details of family life; for example, the smells and sensations of playing in a forbidden field of alfalfa, as well as the profound loves and agonies of living in this family.

Nothing much happens, to tell the truth; indeed, there was much more action in Gilead, even though it took the form of a long letter. With Glory and her father, the reader waits expectantly to see if Jack has truly ‘come home’, we see Glory slowly begin to take delight in caring for both these men, and we watch all the characters struggle against their own hopes. So it’s not a racy read; rather, this is a book to make the reader reflect. And it has good topics for a Christian to think about. It certainly has helped me to think about my children and my home, but more than that, Home helped me to think more about the grace of the gospel.

Sarah Allen