Exiles: A Novel
by Ron Hansen
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Book Summary Information
Author: Ron HansenEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2008-05-13
ISBN: 0374150974
Number of pages: 227
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Book Reviews of Exiles: A Novel
Book Review: "Christ was an exile, too, wasn't he?"
Summary: 4 Stars
Gerard Manley Hopkins, a poet almost unknown in his own lifetime, is the most experimental and most challenging of the Victorian writers. Abandoning "the cloying poetry, sentimentality, and forced rhymes" of his contemporaries, in favor of the "sprung rhythms" of Anglo-Saxon poetry, Hopkins hoped to "recreate the native and natural stresses of speech." A convert to Catholicism, Hopkins joined the Society of Jesus in 1868, and he soon determined that he must give up writing poetry to avoid earthly distractions from his priestly duties.
The wreck of the Deutschland, a passenger vessel going from Germany to New York in December, 1875, and the consequent deaths of five young nuns who were passengers, however, moved him to write a 35-stanza memorial which is among the most "modern" poems of the era. Imagining the nuns' deaths by drowning in frigid waters off the coast of England, Hopkins recreates their religious torments as they face their deaths in the roiling sea. "The Wreck of the Deutschland" (included here as an Appendix), regarded as Hopkins's most important long poem, was never published in his lifetime, even in the Catholic journal to which he submitted it, and it was almost lost forever.
Ron Hansen, the immensely versatile author of Mariette in Ecstasy, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Hitler's Niece: A Novel, and Atticus: A Novel, among other titles, examines the nature of faith, the need for love and acceptance, and the isolation of the exile as he develops two story lines and numerous characters. Hopkins, his family, Jesuit colleagues, and friends are depicted from his earliest decision to convert to the Roman Catholic faith, until his death, roughly twenty years later, in 1889. The stories of the five nuns, which alternate with the sections on Hopkins, depict their childhoods and acceptance of their religious vocations, then expand to include their forced exile from Germany and their experiences on the Deutschland.
Hansen's careful recreations, based on impeccable scholarship, take on life and power here, and even the horrifying images of the foundering Deutschland reflect a kind of ghostly magnificence. Imagery is compressed, as it is in Hopkins's poetry, and the gale facing the Deutschland contrasts starkly with the summer weather that Hopkins experiences during much of his story. The crises of faith faced by the nuns and by Hopkins unite the novel by providing a shared experience.
Because the novel is based on real people and real events, however, there is little room for Hansen to soar into his own creative realm without carrying along the baggage of history, frozen in time, and devoutly religious readers will probably identify more directly with the agonizing questions of faith than will more agnostic readers. Hansen is a remarkable writer who creates intensely dramatic scenes, however, and this novel, filled with vibrant detail and raw emotion, will fascinate many lovers of literary fiction and carefully developed historical characters and events. n Mary Whipple
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