Book review

Title: Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
Grade: B+/A-

This book takes the form of a letter written by an aging pastor to his young son, born after a marriage late in life. It's set in the 1950s and at the start the father says this letter is all the things he wants his son to know about him and about life, as he is sure his time here on earth is short and he won't be around to see his son age.

It's beautiful and sensitive, and mixes history, theology, and family ties. The narrator's father was an ardent pacifist, and his grandfather was an ardent abolitionist who was under John Brown's command during the events of 'Bleeding Kansas', then later fought in the Civil War. Part of the narrative deals with the conflict between the narrator's pacifist father and his not-so-pacifist grandfather - a struggle I can very much relate to.

In between all this is the narrator's own struggle to come to terms with his failing health, as well as his own mixed feelings toward his godson (the son of his best friend), who has been a bit of a prodigal as an adult. I found it to be a great show of grace, and on a personal level can relate it to how I need to be dealing with people in my own life whose life choices I may not agree with. It's a sweet book, and the only reason I'm giving it a B is that the ending is a bit - shall I say - vague? I'm not normally a fiction reader, but this was worth the read.

In my opinion, the best passage: (he is talking about the Spanish influenza pandemic and WWI)
It killed the soldiers by the thousands, healthy men in the prime of life, and then it spread into the rest of the population. It was like a war, it really was...there was talk that the Germans had caused it with some sort of secret weapon, and I think people wanted to believe that, because it saved them from reflecting on what other meaning it might have.

The parents of these young soldiers would come to me and ask me how the Lord could allow such a thing. I felt like asking them what the Lord would have to do to tell us He didn't allow something. But instead I would comfort them by saying we would never know what their young men had been spared. Most of them took me to mean they were spared the trenches and the mustard gas, but what I really meant was that they were spared the act of killing...

It was a strange sickness...Those boys were drowning in their own blood. They couldn't even speak for the blood in their throats, in their mouths. So many of them died so fast there was no place to put them...Now, if these things were not signs, I don't know what a sign would look like. . So I wrote a sermon about it. I said, or I meant to say, that these deaths were rescuing foolish young men from the consequences of their own ignorance and courage, that the Lord was gathering them in before they could go off and commit murder against their brothers. And I said that their deaths were a sign and a warning to the rest of us that the desire for war would bring the consequences of war, because there is no ocean big enough to protect us from the Lord's judgement when we decide to hammer our plowshares into swords and our pruning hooks into spears, in contempt of the will and the grace of God."