Exiles

Ron Hansen's Exiles is the achingly beautiful story of the intersection of the lives of six religious exiles, Gerard Manley Hopkins, the 19th century Jesuit poet and five German Franciscan nuns. Hansen outlines the backgrounds of each of these six and details how they carried on their lives both in the world and later as members of their respective religious communities. The ever so human face of each character is revealed in ways that both move and deeply touch the heart of the reader. The lives of Hopkins and the five nuns run parallel courses as they have taken on similar journeys. All six renounced their own ambitions and made the decision to respond to "God's Will" by going wherever they were sent, and doing whatever was requested of them without question, under "Holy Obedience". This obedience to the "Will of God" as expressed in the decisions made by their superiors cost them their very lives, in more ways than one. Hopkins left his family, his friends and his home in England in obedience to his Jesuit superiors. Ultimately, he renounced his very humanity in order to answer God's call, as he heard it. During a period of religious intolerance in Germany, the Franciscan nuns, members of the Salzkotten Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, left their homeland and set off aboard the steamship Deutschland for the United States. They planned to go to Missouri to assist with the running of a daughter house of their religious community. They never made it. The sisters, along with more than 60 other passengers, lost their lives after the Deutschland ran aground on a sandbar at the mouth of the Thames River in early December 1875. After reading about the wreck of the Deutschland and how the cold cruel waters snatched the lives of these religious women and the other passengers, Hopkins was inspired to commemorate this tragedy by writing the ode "The Wreck of the Deutschland". Prior to this, he had given up writing poetry, something he loved. He felt that time and energy spent composing poems, detracted from living out his vocation as a Jesuit. By renouncing that which he loved he also renounced that which both enlivened his spirit and enriched his teaching. Hopkins was a brilliant eccentric who didn't quite fit the Jesuit mold. Had his life taken a different turn, he may have experienced a joy he only could dream about. Hansen's stirring tale of these six religious seekers is truly a treasure. It is gloriously written and profoundly moving. Perhaps we can all identify with being exiles in some sense, leaving the loved and known behind, in response to a spiritual call.

This is a wonderful book about the poet Gerard M. Hopkins and how he came to write the Wreck of the Deutchland, along with the story of the Franciscan Sisters whose death in that shipwreck so moved Fr. Hopkins. I enjoyed this book for several reasons. First, Ron Hansen is just such a fine writer. All of his books are so well done, and this one especially was very touching, truly looking at the deepdown things, as Hopkins might have said. In a strange way, the story of the sisters parallels that of Hopkins -- the sisters died so terribly in the freezing water and wind, playthings of God it seemed. In another way, this is also true of Hopkins. In so many ways this man of genius was misunderstood, unrewarded, lived in a cold world that didn't seem to have many rewards. Like the nuns, he just puts what hope he has in God. But somehow, this all works together in this book to leave me with a calm sense of hope. I recommend this book without reservation. It is just great.

Ron Hansen, the Gerard Manley Hopkins S.J. Professor of the Arts and Humanities in the English Department of Santa Clara University, has astutely blended two narratives: the story of a reluctant poet and the shipwreck of the S.S. Deutschland on Dec. 6-7, 1875. While 155 passengers and crew were rescued, 64 lives were lost, among them five Roman Catholic nuns: Henrica, Aurea, Norberta, Barbara, and Brigitta, Sisters of Saint Francis, Daughters of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, banished from Germany by an edict of Otto von Bismarck. On taking his vows as a Jesuit priest, Gerard Hopkins (1844-1889) had burned his early poetry, believing his worldly hobby detracted from his religious vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Deeply impressed, however, by the disaster in the Thames River estuary, Hopkins, inspired by his poetic muse, penned an epic ode (35 stanzas, 280 lines), "The Wreck of the Deutschland." Literary critic Robert Hughes, to whom a great deal is owed in preserving Hopkins' poetry, was critical of Hopkins' "exaggerated Marianism ... or the naked encounter of sensualism and asceticism." However, a later critic, F. R. Leavis, esteemed Hopkins as "the only influential poetic of the Victorian age, and he seems to me the greatest." Although Hopkins' poetry is notoriously esoteric and opaque, scattered through his oeuvre are lines of astonishing beauty, as in "The Wreck of the Deutschland," which is included as a coda in this novel. Moving and heartbreaking, Exiles is a brilliant work of art that chronicles the spiritual pilgrimage not only of five Franciscan sisters but also of a tortured poetic genius.

Even if you have never heard of Gerard Manley Hopkins, the Victorian-era Jesuit poet whose misunderstood and underappreciated work would revolutionize the art, or the tragic wreck of the ship called "The Deutschland," an event which proved to be the inspiration for Hopkins's greatest work, you need to read this gorgeous, beautifully written, marvelously composed book. Hansen, author of the luminous "Mariette in Ecstasy," the gripping "Atticus," the dark "Hitler's Niece, and the lighthearted "Isn't It Romantic," is one of this country's greatest stylists, and his astonishing new novel will open your eyes to questions of faith, creativity, friendship, commitment and suffering. I read this book last night in one sitting, and plan to do exactly the same thing again today.

After reading Ron Hansen's 1992 Mariette In Ecstasy, I thought: "This is it. This is the peak of his career as a novelist. Hansen will never be able to top this." I was wrong. His new novel, Exiles, a curious and effective combination of novel and biography, is the best thing he's done to date. It left me breathless. In the novel, Hansen cuts back and forth between the lives and death of the wonderful, bewildering, and innovative poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, and five German Franciscan nuns, America-bound, who perished when the "Deutschland" hit a sandbar off the British coast in the dead of winter. Hopkins was so moved by the newspaper accounts of their death that he wrote a long, 35-stanza poem, "The Wreck of the Deutschland," reflecting on their unhappy end. In Exiles, Hansen speculates about why Hopkins was so affected by the accident. His suggestion is sensitive and nuanced. Hopkins feels a connection with the nuns because all of them are exiles, both literally and spiritually. Literally, the nuns are exiled from their German homeland because of the anti-Church laws pushed through by the Iron Chancellor Bismarck; Hopkins is exiled from his beloved Wales to Dublin, a locale he hated and which in many ways contributed to his early death. Spiritually, all six of the characters are exiles from their true home, God. They're thrust into "a world sour with sinning. Exiles, then, not from Germany, not from Europe, but from Paradise, from Heaven" (p. 192). There is, however, a darker exilic theme in the novel expressed most explicitly in something one of the doomed nuns says: "We sometimes seem God's playthings. The dice he rolls" (p. 186). How to make sense of a shipwreck which destroys the good and the evil, the innocent and the guilty, alike? How to understand arbitrary orders from religious superiors that exile a brilliant poet like Hopkins to a thankless and spirit-breaking assignment? How to deal with the thousand-and-one gratuities of existence that make life seem to be pointless, directionless, meaningless? In our frequently desperate search for coherency and order in a frequently chaotic, indifferent world, we feel ourselves to be orphans and exiles. A brilliant and haunting novel. Highly recommended.