Monday, October 27, 2008

Exiles, by Ron Hansen


The Catholic Readers Society met on Sunday, October 19 to discuss Ron Hansen's new historical novel Exiles. Generally speaking the novel was not well-liked. Most of us felt that Hansen attempted to take on too much in too short a time, and thus was not able to convey the full humanity of the characters about whom we were supposed to be concerned. The book attempts to combine two separate stories: first, the death of five Catholic sisters in the wreck of the Deutschland, a passenger ship carrying them to an American mission and away from the restrictive laws of Bismarck's Kulturkampf, in nineteenth-century Germany. The second story concerns the development of Gerard Manley Hopkins as a poet, especially as influenced by the Deutschland disaster, immortalized in his poem commemorating it.


Especially disconcerting to our dear readers were the following problems: 1) That the mixture of historical fact and authorial license was not artfully made. Many of us wondered how much of this were true, and most gave up on trying to sort it out, but it made us uneasy. 2) Hopkins comes off somewhat too 'pious', given what we knew of his character and the manifest difficulty of his style. 3) As mentioned above, the effort to cram the life stories of the five missionary sisters into the early chapters was tediously done, in part because the limitations of the book (I.e. 200 pages) required a cursory group of paragraphs on each. Rather than bringing us into the story, they felt like nonfictional tabloid biographies. 4) More historical background on both aspects of the novel would have been welcome: English anti-Catholicism could have been fleshed out a bit, but even more, we craved a more detailed sense of life under Bismarck that would have humanized the sisters' struggle to seek a solution in their ill-fated mission.

We did begin a very good discussion on Hopkins, and this led us to pick his poetry as the topic for the next meeting, November 9. The Prior suggests the following poems, which can be accessed at the following website:


http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/gerard_manley_hopkins/poems

2: Pied Beauty
3: God's Grandeur
19: Thou Art Indeed Just Lord, If I Contend
23: The Skylight Night
27: The Caged Skylark
45: My Own Heart Let Me Have More Pity On. Let
53: To What Serves Mortal Beauty?
62: Henry Purcell

Tip: We suggest reading the poems aloud and several times!

Rating for Exiles: 1 star (not recommended)