Identification with the characters is made easier for readers by the construc- tion of the three novels. It’s a character with complexity that I want to know better.’

The one consist- ent thing among my novels is that there’s a character who stays in my mind. And I don’t give anything a higher priority than character. In that same Paris Review interview Robinson wrote, ‘I feel strongly that action is generated out of character. The extraordinary success of the Gilead novels and the warmth of reader response are testimony to the goodness and frailty of the characters in their explorations of mortality, grace and forgiveness (‘the posture of grace’). Yet some are.Ĭharacter, however is the key. Clearly novels are not always there to enlarge our sympathies. Even as relatively recently as 1948, in his essay ‘Manners, Morals, and the Novel’, the highly influential American critic Lionel Trilling could write of the novel as ‘involving the reader himself in the moral life, invit- ing him to put his own motives under examination’. ‘Poetry strengthens the faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man’, as Shelley phrased it. This is not to be confused with the moral education of characters in, say, a Henry James novel, but a refining of the reader’s senses. Nowadays it is fashionable to debunk the notion of art as humanising, a kind of moral education. The Gilead novels certainly cause us to revive that grand old humanistic claim that Literature trains our moral feelings.

198): ‘It seems to me that anything that is written compassionately and perceptively probably satisfies every definition of religious whether a writer intends it to be religious or not.’ Robinson approached a similar idea from a Christian perspective in The Death of Adam (2005) where she wrote that ‘humanism clearly rested on the idea that people have souls, and that they have certain obligations to them, and certain pleasures in them, which arise from their refinement or their expression in art.’ Robinson would take exception to this no doubt, arguing as she does in an illuminating interview in The Paris Review (No. A further consolation surely is that, given the way the author treats her thematic concerns, the Gilead novels read like religious texts – at least for sympathetic non-believers. The Cold War (with its tense race relations) and the hardscrabble 1930s are settings which to us, with our increasingly dysfunctional world view, seem comparatively innocent. One reason for the success of these novels may be that their settings of- fer the reader the consolation of distance. The first two novels deal with the anxieties and hopes of John Ames and Robert Boughton, old clergymen in the small, fictional Iowan town of Gilead in the 1950s, the latest with the early life of Lila Dahl, Ames’s wife. With Gilead (2004), Home (2008) and Lila (2014) Marilynne Robinson has produced a body of work of a quality unparalleled in modern fiction, I believe.

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