Exiles: A Novel

EXILES by Ron Hansen is a novel which examines the mystical ties between the challenges experienced by poet and Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins and the deaths of five German nuns in sea disaster. Hopkins' poem "The Wreck of the Deutschland" is woven into the narrative. The first chapters of the book I found riveting for the realistic descriptions of Hopkins' life with the Jesuit scholastics; it was so beautifully written that every line needed to be savored. However, as the book progressed, other than the harrowing scenes of the sinking ship, it became more like a biography of Hopkins and less like historical fiction. Perhaps the author was trying to convey the sense of dryness and desolation of Hopkins' soul, I do not know.The nuns are introduced in what resembled colorful Wikipedia entries so that the five women sort of ran together for me. The sisters are endearing, nevertheless; they are taken away from us just as we are really getting acquainted with them. They reminded me of nuns whom I have known in my own life. However, my dear nun friends would not quite approve of a sister looking at herself naked in the mirror, as Sister Henrica does in one rather odd scene. Not that the body is bad or shameful, but nuns are not supposed to be preoccupied with themselves, and looking at oneself naked in the mirror conjures up all kinds of thoughts, "I'm too fat, I'm too thin, I'm ugly, I'm beautiful" and most of the old-fashioned nuns were striving to be beyond all that. Perhaps European nuns in the nineteenth century had a different view of things, but I doubt it.It is also out of place in Catholic art or literature for a nun to be shown nude, simply out of respect for the vocation of the bride of Christ. Our Lady, female saints, and nuns are generally not depicted in their nakedness, with a some exceptions, such as Eve, of course. The description in Exiles was in no way lewd or erotic; maybe the author wanted to demonstrate the sister unknowingly preparing for her baptism of pain and death. It was just one short paragraph, but a strange one.The novel delves into the heart of self-offering to God and the utter immolation that is the result. The sisters die a violent death; Hopkins' death is slower but, like the nuns' final end, is caused indirectly by his consecration of himself in the religious life. One wonders if in the mysterious spiritual order of things, the sacrifice of the nuns obtained for Fr. Hopkins the grace to persevere in his vocation, to endure the contradictions of community life, the rejection by his parents, and the misunderstandings of his peers. Hopkins the poet was moved by the news of the passing of five women whom he had never met, moved enough to write a poem about them. Surely from Heaven they prayed for their spiritual brother, so that like them he died giving after giving his all. Hopkins was solitary but not alone, his sisters mystically stood at his side, even as Our Lady and the holy women stood at the foot of the cross of Christ. In spite of its unevenness and quirks, Exiles conveys the reality of the Communion of Saints, a reality which lies hidden behind the storms and sorrows of this world.

I so wanted to enjoy this book. I have often been inspired by books about the religious life such as most recently  GILEAD  and  HOME  by Marilynne Robinson. The story of five young German nuns, exiled from their country only to be drowned in a shipwreck off the English coast in 1875, could not fail to be moving. And "The Wreck of the Deutschland," Gerard Manley Hopkins' great elegy on the disaster is not only one of the greatest religious poems ever written, but also the first in which his astounding poetic invention emerged full-blown, in incandescent lines such as these: "I did say yes | O at the lightning and lashed rod; | Thou heardst me truer than tongue confess | Thy terror, O Christ, O God."But what can the novelist add to the words of a writer who made language his sword? He can tell the story in more understandable terms, and in this Hansen certainly succeeds. He can place the poem in the context of Hopkins' life as a scholastic studying to become a Jesuit priest, but there are numerous biographies of Hopkins already. He can invent personalities and back-stories for the nuns, of whom little but their names are known, and here he is more truly the novelist. But the sequence of back-to-back character sketches near the beginning of the book is too expository, too compressed. The nuns appear as admirable young women, likeably human, but there is no time for them to emerge as memorable individuals before tragedy engulfs them. Still less can Hansen convey the all-compelling, irresistible power of a religious vocation -- at least not to compare with Hopkins' own confession: "The frown of his face | Before me, the hurtle of hell | Behind, where, where was a, where was a place? | I whirled out wings that spell | And fled with a fling of the heart to the heart of the Host."My complaint is not so much that Hansen spends so much time in exposition, but that he is so obvious about it. He cannot have Hopkins open a copy of The Times without listing all the advertisements to be found on its first page. He has Hopkins talk for an entire paragraph about his former tutor at Oxford, Benjamin Jowett, solely to introduce a humorous bit of doggerel that would surely have been known to all his listeners. No sooner have the nuns gone on board than he has one of them is explain the origin of the English word "posh" (Port Out, Starboard Home), even though it makes no sense whatever in German! He does occasionally manage to convey something of Hopkins' feeling for landscape in passages like the following: "The air smelled cleansed; the leaden sky was topped with clouds; a blue bloom seemed to have spread upon the distant south, enclosed by a basin of hills. And again he felt the charm and instress of Wales." Beautiful -- but the use of the Hopkins-coined word "instress" without any explanation immediately makes the rest seem self-conscious and artificial.Hopkins did not personally know the nuns; when they died, he was "Away in the loveable west | On a pastoral forehead in Wales." So it is important for the author to link them spiritually if not in fact. Other reviewers have suggested that Hopkins also saw himself as something of a spiritual exile. This is something that Hansen will develop later, but he does not go into the reasons for the nun's exile at the time, and he shows Hopkins flying high, the holder of a first-class Oxford degree, poised for success in the Jesuit order. A more likely reason for Hopkins' interest would be the question that, if the five women (and he himself) had given up everything for God, why does God appear to let them down? The point of belief that Hopkins proclaims with such struggle in this and many of his later poems, is the absolute mastery of God -- ESPECIALLY when He wields "the lightning and lashed rod."Two-thirds of the way through the book, however, Hansen draws the two stories together, paradoxically by telling them in two different time-frames. He parallels the two-day ordeal of the nuns on the doomed ship with the twelve-year decline in Hopkins' fortunes until he died of enteric fever in Dublin in 1889. Now he is clearly an exile, barred from higher office as a priest, completely unknown as a poet, reduced to teaching Latin to fractious schoolboys in a distant land. The last fifty pages of Hansen's book are quite moving and attempt something that only a novelist can do. But they do not approach the power of Hopkins' own writing from these years: "O the mind, mind has mountains, cliffs of fall | Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap | May who ne'er hung there...."Once again, Hopkins said it better.

This is an imaginative recreation and abbreviated biography of G.M.Hopkins, a man hardly known in his lifetime, except to friends and colleagues who now occupies a respectable place in the English literary canon. Interleaved is the account of the wreck of a ship among whose passengers were five nuns on a journey from Germany to the USA. The event and their deaths prompted the production of Hopkins' tour de force, his own recreation of that tragedy, fronted with a declaration of his Catholic faith. In a way they are parallel tales of what could be seen as wasted promise. But a waste redeemed by their ultimate outcomes. I enjoyed the story.

This novel would not be for everyone but for a most unusual concept, it's one of the most interesting novels I've read in a long time. It features two concurrent stories: the life of Gerard Manly Hopkins as Jesuit and poet and five German nuns who died in the wreck of the Deutschland when he was a Jesuit novice. For lovers of Hopkins' poetry, it is a treat as it is for lovers of beautifully turned prose. Ron Hansen is to be commended for turning extensive research into such graphic description that the horror of the ship wreck and, indeed, the dwellings of Hopkins, stay with the reader long after the point finale.