Marilynne Robinson, God and Calvin [Orange Prize winner for fiction]

guardian.co.uk ^ | June 4, 2009 | Andrew Brown

[Alex Murphy]

There are two remarkable things about Marilynne Robinson, who won the Orange Prize for fiction: she's a very good writer, and she's a very serious Christian. Her two most recent novels. Gilead and Home, have retold the story of the Prodigal Son from different viewpoints, set in a small town on the Iowa prairie in 1956. "Retelling" is not what you think when first you read them; then the overwhelming effect is of being told a story, and hearing a voice, for the very first time.

But both are, in fact, books about the workings of grace in human life, just as Brideshead was. But they are Calvinist, not Roman Catholic, and their pleasures are very much more humble; also, I think, more vivid. Towards the end of Gilead an old pastor talks about the world around him:

I love the prairie! So often I have seen the dawn come and the light flood over the land and everything turn radiant at once, that word "good" so profoundly affirmed in my soul that I am amazed I should be allowed to witness such a thing. There may have been a more wonderful first moment "when all the morning stars sang together and the sons of God shouted for joy" but for all I know to the contrary, they still do sing and shout and they certainly might well. Here on the prairie there is nothing to distract attention from the evening and the morning, nothing on the horizon to abbreviate or delay. Mountains would seem an impertinence from that point of view.

The link between joy and beauty and the apprehension of God is one which is very vivid in Robinson. I interviewed her last week in Geneva, as part of a Radio 3 programme

[Alex Murphy]

Now this is just about the opposite of the kind of rule-bound and wholly unforgiving religion which most people associate with Calvinism, but in her mind it was linked with predestination, in a most unexpected way. Because predestination implies God's untramelled freedom, he can choose to save those whom the world and its rules – even the church with its rules – might condemn. The prodigal in these two books, Jack Boughton, has done some very terrible things, and all through the book goes on hurting everyone who loves him. Yet it is almost impossible not to suffer with him.

I wanted very much, when I wrote the character of Jack, [to create] a character whom it would be very painful for people to be able to dismiss, with the assumption being that if one could not dismiss him, there would be no reason to believe that God would want to dismiss him, either.

This kind of explicitly theological perspective is vanishingly rare in modern novels. But she shouldn't for a moment be confused with the kind of cheesy wish-fulfilment marketed in "christian" bookshops. Grace, hope, and love break into her novels, but the veil always returns and the world appears again in its accustomed hopelessness. Sometimes the sadness is almost unendurable. I have sat on a commuter train weeping in public as I reread the end of Home.

[sr4402]

She mentioned the biblical doctrine of Predestination in her interview and that God chose those He wished.

This is in line with Revelation 5:9 "...and hast redeemed us to God by thy blood out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation"

If it were random, then some kindred, tongues, peoples and nations would not be there.