Exiles: A Novel | Ron Hansen | finally a fiction book about gerard manley hopkins!

Exiles: A Novel | Ron Hansen | A Peek Under The Habit

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Exiles: A Novel

	Exiles: A Novel Ron Hansen Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008 - 227 pages average customer review:based on 14 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

With Exiles, Ron Hansen tells the story of a notorious shipwreck that prompted Gerard Manley Hopkins to break years of ?elected silence? with an outpouring of dazzling poetry.

In December 1875 the steamship Deutschland left Bremen, bound for England and then America. On board were five young nuns who, exiled by Bismarck?s laws against Catholic religious orders, were going to begin their lives anew in Missouri. Early one morning, the ship ran aground in the Thames and more than sixty lives were lost?including those of the five nuns.

Hopkins was a Jesuit seminarian in Wales, and he was so moved by the news of the shipwreck that he wrote a grand poem about it, his first serious work since abandoning a literary career at Oxford to become a priest. He too would die young, an exile from the literary world. But as Hansen?s gorgeously written account of Hopkins?s life makes clear, he fulfilled his calling.

Combining a thrilling tragedy at sea with the seeming shipwreck of Hopkins?s own life, Exiles joins Hansen?s Mariette in Ecstasy (called ?an astonishingly deft and provocative novel? by The New York Times) as a novel that dramatizes the passionate inner search of religious life and makes it accessible to us in the way that only great art can.

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finally a fiction book about gerard manley hopkins!

I just finished reading this very interesting book and encourage anyone who loves the works of Gerard Manley Hopkins, SJ to read it also. The author skillfully weaves the story of the five German sisters who died on the ship Deutschland with the story of the Jesuit poet, G.M. Hopkins, as he converted to Roman Catholicism, entered the Society of Jesus and wrote an epic poem about the shipwrecked deaths of the five sisters. The author sprinkles in many words or phrases that seem to come from Hopkins' poetic vocabulary and he fleshes out a story that shows the prolonged deaths of the five nuns who were coming to America to avoid anti-Catholic laws in Germany and to ultimately work in hospitals in the Midwest. Obviously, I love Hopkins' poetry and lately, I have become quite interested in Hopkins the person, wanting to know more about him, as he was a literary genius who lived a very obscure and ordinary type of life.

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A Peek Under The Habit

Ron Hansen's blend of biography and novel makes for an interesting read that opens up a little-known (at least to me) tragedy peopled with fascinating characters. The people, of course, make the book worth reading, especially the five German Franciscan nuns who were exiled to America but died in a horrible shipwreck before they could get there. Their individual personalities shine from beneath their austere habits in ways that could indeed inspire poet Gerard Manley Hopkins to pen a 35-stanza ode to their death based on newspaper accounts of the disaster.

Dave Donelson, author of Heart of Diamonds: A Novel of Scandal, Love and Death in the Congo

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Art's Alternative Reality

Exiles, by Ron Hansen

I `m excited to review this book, because Hansen has been one of my favorite writers for a decade. His literary interests have been eclectic, and his skill at writing is something of an inspiration. He's moved from literary westerns to medieval religious culture and persecution, to Hitler's Third Reich, and then to a romantic comedy in his previous book, Isn't It Romantic?
Writers who move so nimbly between genres should be praised to the literary heavens but, sadly, Hansen's readers and reviewers do little more than grumble about his genre changes. Which is probably why he hasn't been able to maintain the following his writing deserves.

Exiles is Hansen's first since Romantic, which was published in 2003. If you haven't guessed from the very rough summation of his writing above, Hansen seems fascinated with history as a subject for fiction. And he seems to have a more than ordinary interest in Catholicism as a sub-culture of Western society. With Exiles, he gives us a moment in history, overlain by its effect on European Catholicism, and throws in a bit of literary history in the bargain.

Exiles is really three stories: the life of Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, the wreck of the German ship Deutschland (which carried five nuns escaping religious persecution in Bismarck's Germany), and the poem Hopkins wrote about the event, The Wreck Of The Deutschland.

I hadn't realized how ambitious such a simple-sounding project could be until I began reading the book. And it appears the inherent difficulties in weaving these three themes into a coherent story seduced Hansen a bit as well.
The book begins with Hopkins as a sometime-poet, all-the-time young Jesuit. He reads of the wreck, then reads deeper, probably morbid with fascination about the five nuns' deaths and the details of the wreck. Then he moves to the nuns and their personal histories, alternating huge chunks of narrative about Hopkins. Finally, he presents in dazzling prose the nuns' ill-fated escape from Germany.
Giving the reader such huge slabs of disparate narrative made this reader wonder at Hansen's focus. The book seems to stop and start several times, without a sense of novelistic continuity. It would seem a more coherent story to have braided these pieces in smaller segments.
But not to worry. The second half makes the book worthwhile. His interweaving becomes tighter, and we see the eloquence that first drew me to be Hansen's fan. Some examples--all from his depictions of the shipwreck tragedy-- that wow me:

"The ship had become an island of affliction and torture as a snowfield of sea foam washed over the quarterdeck, stealing whatever it could..."

"The ship groaned in its overweight of water. An injured elephant noise."

"Wind or wetness snuffed five of the six tapers, so that there was only a mist of yellow light in the gloom of the saloon."

Admittedly, Hansen's pushing the envelope here, but it's not purple prose. He uses such narrative moments to amplify the emotional backdrop of the wreck--and they work.

His historical purpose here is clearly to depict Otto von Bismarck's attempted eviction of Catholics from Germany, this setting the stage for the Third Reich's deeper discriminations. If one were to go deeper into Hansen's intent here, one might also sense a feeling of history's vagaries. The unpredictability of life also affected Hopkins, forcing him to work in obscurity (perhaps the way Hansen has). Hopkins' good friend Robert Bridges became England's Poet Laureate, and the preserver of Hopkins' work. Ironically, Hopkins's literary stature grew in subsequent years, while Bridges' waned.
Such is the condition of creative writing: one makes choices that bring fame and fortune in one's lifetime; others, perhaps truer to their art, eschew fame in the moment, only to gain literary stature beyond their lifespans.

It's also interesting to compare the history of the Deutschland wreck to Hopkins' long poem to Hansen's broader account. From such comparison we can only conclude that such fact-based literary perspectives create something separate from history, perhaps art's alternative reality--the one literary theory constantly struggles to explain.

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poetic inspiration v. priestly vocation

"This is a work of fiction based on fact," writes novelist Ron Hansen. On December 6, 1875 the passenger ship Deutschland ran aground on a sandbar in the mouth of the Thames River. Before its rescue the following day, 157 people died of exposure to the frigid waters and blizzard conditions. Among those who perished were five Franciscan nuns from Germany who were traveling to Missouri via New York City. The young Jesuit seminarian Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) was so moved by the tragedy that he memorialized the event in a 35-stanza poem called The Wreck of the Deutschland. In alternating chapters Hansen tells the stories of the nuns who died and the poet who commemorated them.

Very little is known about the five nuns, except that they were expelled from Germany because of Bismarck's anti-Catholic measures. They were exiles in the literal sense of the word, but also in the figurative sense of having left their homes and families for the cause of Christ. Like many exiles, they met a tragic end. Much more is known about Hopkins, the oldest of nine children who, under the influence of the famous Cardinal John Henry Newman, converted to Catholicism in 1866. And as if this was not enough to embitter his parents, he chose the Jesuits. Eleven years later his mother and father refused to attend his ordination to the priesthood.

Hopkins was not only "exiled" by his parents but also by the larger Anglican world at Oxford. An eccentric and over scrupulous man plagued by "black moods," Hopkins was also alienated from his own self. He abandoned poetry to pursue the priesthood, and even burned much of his early verse. The secular pursuit of poetry was no match for the spiritual vocation of a priesthood. Or was it? Hopkins remained deeply conflicted about this throughout his life. Close to his death, he made his confession, which included his regret for "shutting off the grace of inspiration by not paying enough attention to his poetic gift" (202). Hopkins was further exiled when he was sent by the Jesuits to Ireland, and also because of his highly experimental and complicated poetic style called "sprung rhythm," which was little understood or appreciated by his close friends and colleagues.

The famous shipwreck seemed to provoke Hopkins to a time of poetic creativity after a period of silence. Otherwise, these are two stories that proceed along parallel tracks that don't intersect, except for the broader themes of exile and fate. Hopkins was left to brood over the tragic fate of the five nuns, and over his own life which, as put it, was kicked around like "Fortune's football." Ultimately, Hopkins, the nuns, and all of us are exiles, "not from Germany, not from Europe, but from Paradise, from Heaven" (192).

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A non-fiction novel

The German steamship Deutschland sank off the coast of England on December 8, 1875. Five German nuns, bound for America to escape the anti-Catholic legislation of their homeland, lost their lives. Gerard Manley Hopkins, an English convert to Roman Catholicism, was a Jesuit seminarian in Wales at the time, who read about the shipwreck in the newspapers. Over the next several days, he wrote a long, elegaic poem, "The Wreck of the Deutschland," which like a great deal of his highly original and imaginative poetry, was not published in his lifetime. After a career as a priest and teacher marred by poor health, he died in 1889 at age 45, his youthful promise apparently unfulfilled.

From these improbable facts, Ron Hansen has skilfully constructed what he calls "a work of fiction based on fact"; the more appropriate literary term is probably "non-fiction novel." Like a film director cross-cutting among related stories, Hansen gives us alternating scenes that portray the back stories of the five German nuns; daily life at the Jesuit seminary in 1875; Hopkins' later career and agonizing death; and, in vivid detail, the final hours of Deutschland as its passengers and crew come to terms with imminent death.

Although beautifully written, this work never really comes to life. Hansen's previous novels, especially Mariette in Ecstasy, demonstrate an ability to create believable characters and imagine their interior lives, but he seems reluctant in this case to go beyond the incontrovertible biographical facts. He creates dialogue for the nuns and their fellow passengers, but puts in Hopkins' mouth only the words of his own letters. This is unfortunate, because Hopkins the man, like the unusual metrical structure and mystical sensibility of his verse, is probably more accessible to the modern reader than to his Victorian contemporaries. What is really missing here is drama; if only Hansen had been a little more daring!

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3

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