Mags Gargan
Lila by Marilynne Robinson
Anna Farmar
The many readers who love Marilynne Robinson’s work will find her fourth novel, Lila, richly satisfying. Revisiting the town in Iowa and some of the characters of her last two novels, Gilead and Home, she shifts the focus this time to the eponymous Lila, the much younger wife of the town’s pastor, the Rev. John Ames.
Lila’s story, told in the third person but at times in her own voice, is strange and moving. The reader must pay great attention as the narrative shifts backwards and forwards in time from Lila’s reflections on her present life in the peaceful order of the preacher’s house, to her hard-scrabble existence before she settled in Gilead.
The contrast with her childhood and youth, spent on the move with her protector, Doll, and a little band of migrant workers, disturbs her. This is the world of The Grapes of Wrath where the families of the dispossessed, the farmers ruined by the Depression, take to the roads, accepting any little work that offers, always moving on.
Doll is fiercely maternal, but Lila is not her child. She has abducted her from the neglectful family where she had been boarded. Thereafter, they are on the run, Doll always looking over her shoulder in case Lila’s family should catch up with them. The loving bond between the two is tenderly evoked: “Doll may have been the loneliest woman in the world, and she was the loneliest child, and there they were, the two of them together, keeping each other warm in the rain.”
Old man
Less convincing are the scenes between “the old man”, as the Rev. Ames is consistently named, and Lila. His protectiveness and his attempts to find out what she is thinking seem at times intrusive: her life on the road has taught her to be wary and distrustful.
Pastor Ames and Lila puzzle over the meaning of existence, the problem of evil being allowed by a benign God, the division of humanity into the elect and unelect: what will happen, agonises Lila, in the next life to her beloved Doll, who was never baptised, and to the little band they roamed with for so long, who “cussed and stole and hurried past churches”?
Plot is not important in Marilynne Robinson’s novels. Her great strengths are her almost hypnotic, sonorous, bible-steeped writing style, her tender-heartedness towards the rejected and outcasts of this world and her steady belief in the meaning of life, of ordinary things, of the value of every person.
Her quiet, insistent voice is a refreshing counterbalance to the cynicism, nihilism and squalor of so much of modern culture.
