The reverend's letter

Marilynne Robinson's Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead is the sort of book that's easy to misunderstand, or at least lose patience with. The very premise of the novel"" an elderly reverend writing a book-length letter for his seven-year-old son ""seems to consign it to the self-help shelves of bookstores, along with the alchemists and Ferrari-hawking monks.

But this is a deeper, more thoughtful and ambiguous story. It doesn't talk down to the reader and it's told in the voice of a man who, despite having devoted a lifetime to prayer, admits to struggling continually with his moral compass.

This graceful novel is set in 1956 in the small town of Gilead, Iowa, where Reverend John Ames has lived for most of his years. After a lifetime spent largely in loneliness, the reverend, against all expectations, found love and married a much younger woman late in his life. Now, faced with ill health, he fears his little son will never get to know him; hence this long letter.

He begins by expressing regret at being set apart from other people by virtue of his calling. Passing two non-churchgoing youngsters on the street, he notes that they stop joking loudly when they see him coming: "I felt like telling them, I appreciate a joke as much as anybody. There have been many occasions in my life when I have wanted to say that. But it's not a thing people are willing to accept."

In his soft, measured way the reverend gradually admits to feelings of insecurity, even jealousy, the pain of a life marked by patches of deep loneliness and an inability to forgive certain things. Though he doesn't admit it in so many words, one senses that he could never quite come to terms with the unhappy relationship between his pacifist father and his abolitionist grandfather, a relationship that cast a shadow over the family.

In Robinson's beautiful, simple prose the reverend mulls on death and atheism, speaks with wonder about the beauty there is to be found in the smallest, most everyday things, discusses his experience baptising a litter of kittens ("the sensation of really knowing a creature, I mean really feeling its mysterious life and your own mysterious life at the same thing").

There is deep, residual melancholy as he talks of a girl he was briefly married to in his youth, who died in childbirth, and his daughter, who would have been 51 years old if she'd survived. He imagines his grown daughter coming back "from a place where everything is known", and this thought cautions him from taking his doctrines too much to heart.

At the heart of Reverend Ames's story is his relationship with his best friend's son, named after him, who did something terrible a long time ago, something the reverend has never been able to find it in his heart to forgive or understand.

The sin committed by the younger John Ames goes so far against the grain of the reverend's own strong feelings about the responsibilities parents have towards their children (feelings that are accentuated by his family's history and by the loss of his own wife and child 50 years earlier) that it takes him the span of the book to conquer his bitterness and make his peace with his namesake. But the reconciliation, when it comes, is therapeutic for both men.

Gilead won't appeal to all readers; you might get put off by the specificity of Christian references, especially in a brief midsection when there's a little too much Psalm-analysing. But if you can get through those bits and make it to the moving resolution, you'll find much to cherish.

This is a book that grows on you; the experience of reading it is a little like swaying gently in a rocking chair when everything around you is still and quiet and there's a cool breeze blowing. And chances are that once you've finished it you'll want to open it again and reread a passage at random. So I'll just leave you with one:

"I feel sometimes as if I were a child who opens its eyes on the world once and sees amazing things it will never know any names for and then has to close its eyes again. I know this is all mere apparition compared to what awaits us, but it is only lovelier for that. There is a human beauty in it. And I can't believe that, when we have all been changed and put on incorruptibility, we will forget our fantastic condition of mortality and impermanence, the great bright dream of procreating and perishing that meant the whole world to us."

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GILEAD

Marilynne Robinson
Virago
Pages: 282; Price: £14.99