Book Review: Lila, Marilynne Robinson, Virago
‘The life she’s decided she would never have was there the whole time trapped and furious, and in that minute she knew that if a man she ought to hate said one kind word to her, there was no telling what she might do.’
Marilynne Robinson has a gift of opening up a character’s innermost thoughts and taking you, as the reader, there, swimming around inside another person’s way of thinking about the world.
The world that Lila is set in is a post-war small town called Gilead, in Iowa, following on from her other novels, Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead and Orange Prize-winning Home.
Lila, tells the story of Gilead from Lila’s perspective, how she was a homeless wanderer whose only possession was a knife. The knife keeps reappearing in the novel and is Lila’s physical connection with her past, which is very much in contrast to her present. In the present she is married, happily, to John Ames, an elderly church pastor.
Much of the book is a detailed monologue of thoughts drifting from the past to the present and back again. There are no chapters. It’s almost a stream of consciousness but is saved, if that’s the right word, by a tight timeline; the journey could be described as from one baby in the past to another one in the present.
Although there are many bible references dispersed throughout the book and, of course, the perspective on the world through John Ames’s eyes as a church pastor, I found the references to the Christian faith incomplete and frustratingly incapable of conveying an answer to a fundamental question ‘What is a Christian?’ and its corollary, ‘How does someone become Christian?’
‘His body still had the habits of largeness and strength’
Whether purposefully or not, the sacramental perspective ie someone becomes a Christian when they are baptised (not what I understand from the New Testament), is introduced in the conversation between John Ames and his life-long friend Robert Boughton, the minister of another church in Gilead.
But Lila is not written as a Christian tract!
It is beautifully crafted. Some passages are as poetic as they are descriptive, and if you enjoy close detail and honesty about the human condition, this will enthral you. Speaking of John Ames, Lila (or is it the author, it’s not always easy or necessary to choose) is caught thinking, ‘His body still had the habits of largeness and strength’.
If you’re after action, adventure in the sense of fast talking, fast movement, this is not the book for you. There is plenty of action and adventure, but at a much slower pace, that’s all.