Books to give you hope: Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

This summer, Guardian writers will be digging out favourite reading to help lift spirits in a gruelling year. Marilynne Robinson’s dignified story of ordinary life sets us off

Sian Cain
Wednesday 10 August 2016

If literature is not the cure for all ills, it is at least a balm for some anxieties, an elixir for a few worries. When we were looking for a theme for our annual summer series on the books desk, every idea was overtly tied to current events. Books about Europe, elections, politics. It was both unavoidable, and something we wanted to avoid. To briefly strap on my pith helmet and take a rare step into the wild, alien world of political commentary: I think we now all agree 2016 has been a year of relentlessly bad news.

So when we finally we settled on the theme “books to give you hope”, we had some worries that the pitch was potentially too broad, and too ambitious (“Don’t fret everyone, we have books!”). But when we put the idea to you in our Reading group, you put us at ease. The sheer range of books you proposed to give someone hope – PG Wodehouse, Lord of the Rings, nonfiction by Laurie Lee or Amy Liptrot, Catch-22 (the eventual top choice) – showed us that the breadth of the theme was interesting in itself, as it lent itself equally to all genres and moods.

Marilynne Robinson

So what we are hoping for this time around is not to indulge in some prescriptive posturing, a sort of vague bibliotherapy that doesn’t account for your individual concerns – rather, these are books that gave us hope at different times, titles that variously taught us something new about the world, or ourselves.

Now, for mine. The first time I read Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, some years ago, was on my first day of holidays after some particularly rigorous university exams. It was a transcendental experience. I remember wandering around in a kind of fugue state, dazedly responding when spoken to and mashing some food into my face during breaks, as I finished it in one sitting. This isn’t hyperbole – Gilead is a serene, almost meditative book, and Robinson writes with an unnameable, enviable quality that forces you to read slowly, with intention.

This is not to imply her writing is soporific or dull; on the contrary, the frequent bursts of pleasure that come from reading such sweet clarity are invigorating. Robinson’s novels are rare things, and all the better for it: four in 33 years and all four are fantastic. “I would rather be tastefully silent,” she has previously said, than write a bad book. It shows.

Gilead is told through a letter by John Ames, a terminally ill pastor in the crumbling prairie town of Gilead, who is writing a letter to his seven-year-old son. The letter is full of advice and religion, but is also confessional, with revelatory truths about Ames’s family history – all delivered among small moments of self-interruption as he observes his son play, talk, eat in real time. Treasured moments to a father who knows he will not see his son reach adulthood.

Ames finds new, heartbreaking beauty in everything around him: Sundays (“Sometimes I have loved the peacefulness of an ordinary Sunday. It is like standing in a newly planted garden after a warm rain”), nature (“a line of oak trees can still astonish me”), even his heart, which now flutters with a new irregularity. Everything is more beautiful for being ephemeral. As death comes closer, Ames’s musings become increasingly metaphysical: “I feel as if I am being left out, as though I’m some straggler and people can’t quite remember to stay back for me.” He laments what he can offer his son: “What have I to leave you but the ruins of old courage, and the lore of old gallantry and hope?”

It all sounds very worthy – except it isn’t. To label Gilead worthy would be to imply that it is very deliberately trying to improve you. But the worth found in Gilead is something much stranger, at least for me; as a young person imagining a grand, dramatic future for myself, it taught me that an ordinary life could be also be good and even more meaningful. When you’re young and invincible, with a head full of vague plans for as-yet-unperformed great deeds, it is a useful lesson to learn that quietness does not equate with insignificance. Ames’s life – an existence of small impact, but a graceful one – has enviable value. Years on, Gilead still makes me hopeful by reminding me of the possibilities in my future, as ordinary and small as it may turn out to be. As Ames concludes, to his son and himself: “There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient.”

THE GUARDIAN