Gilead, Matterdale and Montelepre

I've never visited any of them, though probably been within 10 miles of the last two. All are places richly evoked in fact and fiction. Gilead, as anyone already hopelessly in love as I am with the poetic, pithy prose of Marilynne Robinson will know, doesn't exist but is modelled on Tabor in Iowa. It seemed too much to hope that there would be a third angle on the events described from the perspective of Rev John Ames in Gilead and mostly - though not in the first person - through the eyes of Glory Boughton in the even richer Home. But here it is, the breathtakingly bitter-sweet narrative of the woman called Lila, from the wanderings of her youth with the woman who kept her from starvation in the Great Depression to the unlikely love of the old pastor which, as far as her natural pessimism and wariness of other humans permit her, Lila reciprocates.

In a way it's a 'prequel' - horrid but useful word - because it predates the events of the first and second books. You can read them in any order and they'll be just as rewarding in different ways - indeed, having finished Lila I now feel inclined to return to Gilead and Home. These are books for life, or rather for revisiting at different stages in one's existence, like Tolstoy's War and Peace, Cervantes' Don Quixote or Lampedusa's The Leopard (I cite these because I've viewed them differently over 20 or 30 years).

The beauty of the very genuine marriage that is the heart of the book is how Ames questions aspects of religion he has taken for granted, and how a guarded Lila gropes her way towards finding names and words for the big issues of life, things for which she never had the time or the need when she was simply trying to keep alive.

He writes to her: 'You must have thought I say the things I do out of habit and custom, rather than from experience and reflection. I admit there is some truth in this. It is inevitable, I suppose'. She's trying to make sense of the one thing she's known, existence, which she's only learned to name through listening to Ames' sermons:

Poor was nothing, tired and hungry were nothing. But people only trying to get by, and no respect for them at all, even the wind soiling them. No matter how proud and hard they were, the wind making their faces run with tears. That was existence, and why didn't it roar and wrench itself apart like the storm it must be, if so much of existence is all that bitterness and fear?

Later, there's the kind of distillation which makes Shakespeare great (I think time and again of Parolles' 'Simply the thing I am shall make me live'). Their child has been born; Ames says 'it's all a prayer'. She says 'The best things that happen I'd never have thought to pray for. In a million years. The worst things just come like the weather. You do what you can'. Just beautiful in its simplicity.

James Rebanks' simplicity in The Shepherd's Life is often distilled poetry - literally, he tells us. But as the most practical of Lake District farmers with a parallel career outside that world, a rare voice from the inside, he's not inclined to sentimentalise the landscape. And as a scholar who came late to Oxford after flunking exams and messing about at school, he's come to value the things he used to laugh at, like the best of Wordsworth's poetry. He sees all that beauty, but he's part of it. And this shepherd's life is very, very complex.

The descriptions of breeding, rearing, knowing your flock make you wonder how he does it - and, of course, the answer is, by sheer hard work, instinct and by a collective experience that goes back generations. His father and grandfather play a major part in the narrative, but the tradition is much longer than that:

Our farming system is not about maximizing productivity, but producing what we can sustainably from the landscape.

It took traditional communities often thousands of years to learn by trial and error how to live and farm within the constraints of tough landscapes like ours. It would be foolish to forget these lessons or allow the knowledge to fall out of use. In a future without fossil fuels, and with a changing climate, we may need these things again.

Rebanks is now 'full of hope for the future', seeing young people coming to the old way of farming, changing and adapting and 'juggling it with more modern lives, but the heart of it will remain'. I hope so too.

Strange how 'tough landscapes' can sustain, or not, such different peoples. Was Sicily's ongoing human waste man-made or rooted in that island? Norman Lewis in The Honoured Society: The Sicilian Mafia Observed and Gavin Maxwell in God Protect Me From My Friends have different propositions that are not exactly answers. At the centre of Lewis's typically eloquent account, full of irony and savage indignation, and the subject of Maxwell's study is bandit Salvatore Giuliano, a son of Montelepre who, it's implied, had the capacity to be something better in different circumstances.

I feared Maxwell was going to romanticise him, but he has his own fierce take on how this half-educated peasant was, after all, a mass murderer, even if he tried to justify his behaviour as a kind of Robin Hood bound to a code of honour which turns out to be fatuous and destructive. The best context for such a mass of contradictions comes in Lewis's summing-up of the period between 1943 and 1964:

For centuries, and as a matter of coolly considered policy, the feudalists had kept back huge areas of Sicily from cultivation. They had developed a neatly effective system for suffocating the periodic outbursts of despair this policy engendered: the desperate spirit turned bandit was enlisted in emergency in the feudalists' private armies, employed like a prison camp trusty to quell the mutinies of his fellow sufferers, and then, the crisis past, coldly destroyed...Slowly they had fused with the Mafia - detached from the peasants it once protected - as the richest men of honour became landowners and the most astute of the feudalists joined the Honoured Society, The Mafia-feudalist combination had pulled the wool over the Allies' eyes in 1943, and the Allies had been tricked into assisting the Mafia's reanimation [because, believe it or not, Mussolini had pursued it close to the brink of extinction, or at least pushed it further underground]. Giuliano had been the puppet of the Mafia-feudalists, and their finger had been on the trigger of his machine-gun when he set off at Portella della Ginestra to teach the peasants what they must face when they dared to vote as free men [this terrible massacre has to be at the core of any book dealing with Giuliano]. The supporters of the feudal system had littered the streets and the waste places of Sicily with the corpses of their opponents, but the damage done by outright violence was nothing by comparison to the crushing of the Sicilian spirit and the anaesthetising of the Sicilian conscience in an artificially prolonged climate of illiteracy, ignorance and fear.

Both Maxwell and Lewis bring novelistic tension to the turning of Giuliano's right-hand man, the romantically handsome Gaspare Pisciotta, both before and after the leader's once-mysterious death. Pisciotta, in fact, is the protagonist of a parallel sweep of story interlocking with Giuliano's. I was captured by his character, too, and surprised to find the name 'Pisciotta' on the card of the nice man who drove us from Scopello to Palermo airport back in June.

Unless you hunt it out, the Mafia tradition in western Sicily needn't be part of any tourist's experience. The reality of life there must be much as Mary Taylor Simeti describes it with so much careful nuance in On Persephone's Island: A Sicilian Journal. Here's an American intellectual who has a right to talk about Sicily as both outsider and insider - the classic 'double consciousness' of Henry James - since she married a man from Alcamo and her children are natives of the island. And a year as she describes it in her multifarious journey weaves Mafia shocks into a narrative of farm and city life - a presence, and potentially fatal, but not the only one. I mention this because it's important, if you love Sicily as I do from superficial experience, to strike a balance between the narratives exclusively devoted to the Mafia and others focused too entirely on the traveller's constant amazement at the archaeological and historic riches such a culture constantly brings forth.

Bernanos and Robinson: states of grace

The strange world of Georges Bernanos has enveloped me since I began City Lit Opera in Focus classes on Poulenc's Dialogues des Carmélites, a work I'm now more convinced than ever is one of the great 20th century masterpieces. It's already prompted the most probing conversations with the students on essential matters of life, terminal illness and faith; I look forward to seeing Robert Carsen's already celebrated production at the Royal Opera next week. The source is rather extraordinary, too, a swansong screenplay written by Bernanos in the last year of his life when he knew the end was near ('is it not high time to die when one is 59?' asks young, naive and yet startlingly assured Sister Constance).

It is, like his best-loved novel The Diary of a Country Priest, about fearing one 'should not know how to die when the time came', and about the fear of fear embodied in terrified Blanche, which takes us back further to the semi-factual novella on which the screenplay is based, Gertrud von Le Fort's The Last on the Scaffold. I found it in a funny religious imprint by The Neumann Press, Long Prairie, Minnesota translated as The Song at the Scaffold (another rather lurid church publication illustrated below).

The 'song' of course is the Salve Regina which the nuns intone as they face the guillotine, the voices cutting off one by one at the swish and thud of the blade in perhaps the most shattering conclusion to any opera. And they did so in truth, along with the Veni, Creator Spiritus, in July 1794, as recorded by Mother Marie of the Incarnation, who happened to be in Paris on business when her sisters at Compiègne were arrested, and who lived on (until 1836) to tell the tale. Blanche, the protagonist, is a fictional creation, the embodiment of that fear which fascinated and to a certain extent afflicted Bernanos all his life.

His approach to it is also foreshadowed in von Le Fort's book, written in 1931 at a time when the author must have sensed another forthcoming cataclysm in her own country (she was persecuted by the Nazis and driven to Oberstdorf on the Austrian border). Into Sister Marie's mouth she puts the rhetorical question: 'Must fear and horror always be evil? Is it not possible that they may be deeper than courage, corresponding much more closely to the reality of things - the terrors of the world and especially our own weakness?' In religious terms, it's paralleled with Christ's agony - hence Blanche's appellation 'of the Agony of Christ', a title we learn the first Prioress also took - and clearly outlined in her assertion that 'there has never been more than one morning, Easter Day and every night is that of the Blessed Agony'.

You think I'm going all Catholic?* Well, all I can say is that Bernanos's grasp of the dark side of human nature is what makes his books so compelling and real. His characters pass through depression, the valley of the shadow of death, spiritual crisis, call it what you will. The nameless country priest is so badly shaken that his dark night of the soul cannot be written about. He lacks confidence, and doesn't realise the good he does simply by talking to the tormented. He knows that 'man is always at enmity with himself- a secret, sly kind of hostility', a hostility which explodes in the slippery nightmare world of Monsieur Ouine, a troubling read as I'm currently experiencing it.

There, in the work he regarded highest of all among his novels, Bernanos throws at us in a slimy, stream-of-consciousness ooze suggestions of awful depravities. The worst in The Diary of a Country Priest is, its protagonist writes,

the sin against hope - the deadliest sin, and perhaps also the most cherished, the most indulged. It takes a long time to become aware of it, and the sadness which precedes and heralds its advent is so delicious! The richest of all the devil's elixirs,his ambrosia.

One of the priest's worst moments is 'a mad rush of thoughts, words, images. In my soul, nothing. God is silent. Silence.' The link with Bergman, and above all with Winter Light, is striking (the wonderful Gunnar Björnstrand pictured below).

No wonder that Robert Bresson, another great filmmaker, was inspired by Bernanos to make Mouchette as well as the Diary (time I saw this again).

These great artists penetrate the darkest corners of the human psyche. By the way, the French film that eventually resulted from Dialogues used very little of Bernanos's script. Still, to judge from the cover of the book illustrated up top, it stars Jeanne Moreau, always worth seeing. Unfortunately the movie doesn't seem to be available on DVD at the moment.

In the cold light of Bernanos's biography - and I picked up an excellent one second-hand by Robert Speaight, whose Shakespeare study is one of my bibles - he shouldn't have anything to offer me. He started his career as a deeply conservative Catholic, anti-semitic and far too allied with the Action Française. Already, in 1926, he was tortured by his own 'grim lucidity': 'I am between the Angel of light and the Angel of darkness, looking at them each in turn with the same enraged hunger for the absolute'. His polemic could be egotistical, his satire overloaded, and that remained true even when, having stuck out the war in exile, he returned to France and railed against its post-1945 compromises. But in an important way he also became free, almost an anarchist at times.

Despair and disgust were never far away; they are partly what make his writing so powerful. His own death was almost as painful as that of the first Prioress in the Dialogues - a scene which would surely have given the Catholic church a few qualms. When Poulenc took up the thread, he gave it an extra dimension, a real spirituality similarly disrupted by doubt and pain. The human condition is at its most intense in both screenplay and opera.

A more poised, sparely-worded compassion for the soul's dark night and the possibility of grace irradiate the extraordinary novels of Marilynne Robinson.

Gilead is the book everyone urges you to read, but I'd insist that it has to be accompanied by the situation seen from a different perspective in Home. I only hope that when the time comes to turn these books into a film, it will be a long two-parter - the first seen from the Rev John Ames's viewpoint as he tries to explain it to his son, the second from Glory Boughton's. It would be invidious to declare which is the greater book; if, simply as a matter of personal taste, I prefer Home, it's because the very nature of Gilead is the narrative of a good but emotionally circumscribed man's attempt to put his deeper feelings into words and grapple with the unfamiliar devil of jealousy, while Home goes to the piercingly human heart of the damaged soul who is the real, and infinitely fascinating, subject of both books, the prodigal Jack Boughton.

Home embodies its piercing truths in dialogue and situation; Gilead gives us a few more excerptable reflections. There are several that bring us full circle to the preoccupations of Bernanos. One is this:

The history of the chuch is very complex, very mingled. I want you to know how aware I am of that fact. These days there are so many people who think loyalty to religion is benighted, if it is not worse than benighted. I am aware of that, and I know the charges that can be brought against churches are powerful. And I know, too, that my own experience of the church has been, in many senses, sheltered and parochial. In every sense, unless it really is a universal and transcendent life, unless the bread is the bread and the cup is the cup everywhere, in all circumstances, and it is a time with the Lord in Gethsemane that comes for everyone, as I deeply believe.

The second is when Jack asks Ames if he believes some people are predestined to perdition. What does he reply to people who ask him about it?

'I tell them there are certain attributes our faith assigns to God: omniscience, omnipotence, justice, and grace. We human beings have such a slight acquaintance with power and knowledge, so little conception of justice, and so slight a capacity for grace, that the workings of these great attributes together is a mystery we cannot hope to penetrate.'

Jack remains unsatisfied with the answers. But moments of grace towards the ends of both novels brought tears to my eyes. As in Bernanos, there are no simple, glib solutions to the agony of life, but some hope remains in the bottom of Pandora's jar.

*On reading which, the diplo-mate wryly pointed me in this horrifying direction.