The Barnes & Noble Review
In his 2001 collection, A Stay Against Confusion: Essays on Faith and Fiction, Ron Hansen lamented the misinterpretation of his first two novels, Desperadoes and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, which he'd infused (perhaps too subtly) with biblical themes. Hansen, a devout Roman Catholic, wrote in the essay "Writing as Sacrament": "It's a bad form of sportsmanship for fiction writers to complain that too few reviewers pick up their subtexts, but in fact I was disappointed that the general reading of the book on Jesse James was pretty much as it was for Desperadoes. Hidden beneath the praise were the questions: Why is this guy writing Westerns? When oh when is he going to give his talent to a subject that matters?" He added, "I was frustrated that my fiction did not more fully communicate a belief in Jesus as Lord that was important, indeed central, to my life."
Readers might have overlooked the "crime doesn't pay" angle to Desperadoes or the parable of Cain and Abel running through the Jesse James historical opus, but there was no mistaking the Christian religiosity of Mariette in Ecstasy, Hansen's third novel, which focused on a 17-year-old nun who develops the stigmatic wounds associated with the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. Likewise, Hansen's spiritual beliefs illuminate every page of Exiles, a fictional exploration of the life, work, and premature death of poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, a 19th-century Jesuit priest whose experiments with unconventional meter anticipated the rise of free verse, but whose spiritual reservations about the creation of poetry made him feel exiled from his creative self.
The novel begins on December 8, 1875, in Wales, where a 31-year-old Hopkins (having abandoned his poetry) is studying at Saint Beuno's School of Theology. In that day's newspaper, he reads about the dramatic demise of the Deutschland, a German passenger ship bound for England and the United States, which ran aground near the mouth of the Thames, crumbling slowly over the course of two days while ravenous seas kept rescuers at bay. Among the 157 victims were five Franciscan nuns, "exiles" from Otto von Bismarck's Second Reich, where Catholic religious orders were restricted. Survivors told the paper that one of the nuns, in the midst of the frigid, battering conditions, repeatedly implored "O Christ, come quickly!" as a plea to end their suffering.
"Hopkins was so greatly affected by the account that he was close to tears," Hansen writes in Exiles. "[His rector] considered him and said, 'Perhaps someone should write a poem on the subject.'" That evening, "in the rapture of inspiration," Hopkins put down the first eight lines of what would become "The Wreck of the Deutschland," a departure in style and form from contemporary poems of similar content.
"Among the Victorians there was a general fascination with tales of great tragedies at sea," Hansen writes in the novel. A typical poem about sea disasters was Longfellow's "The Wreck of the Hesperus," which includes the lines:
She struck where the white and fleecy waves
Looked soft as carded wool,
But the cruel rocks, they gored her side
Like the horns of an angry bull.
Considering Longfellow's example, Hansen writes, "[It] was the sort of cloying poetry that seagoing tragedies generally inspired in England and America: their sentiments trite, their rhymes forced, their syllabic counts as regular as the ticking of a hallway clock. Whereas [Hopkins] had long had haunting his ear the echo of a new rhythm that would re-create the native and natural stresses of speech."
His new poem, "The Wreck of the Deutschland," comes together gradually, and Hopkins feels rejuvenated by the flex of his dormant poetic muscles. But when he submits the poem to a Jesuit periodical, The Month, "The subeditor's opinion was that the thirty-five esoteric stanzas were hardly readable and had only managed to give him a headache. And the handwritten pages were eventually returned to Hopkins with regrets."
Exiles shifts back and forth between the nuns on the ship and the creation of the poem, but Hansen has the good sense not to bog down the narrative with dry discussions of the poetic devices -- meter, rhyme scheme, etc. -- at play in "The Wreck of the Deutschland," which wasn't published until 1918, nearly three decades after Hopkins's death from typhoid fever at the age of 44. Hansen, who holds the Gerard Manley Hopkins chair at Santa Clara University, explained in "Affliction and Grace," one of his essays in the aforementioned collection, that "Concentrating solely on the poetry…is in some way to miss the point, for Gerard Manley Hopkins, the man, seems to me as inspiring as his work."
A great deal is known about Hopkins and his conversion to Catholicism, which left him exiled from his family. Much less is known about the five nuns who perished on theDeutschland, and Hansen commendably creates fictional back stories for the women, drawing clear differences between their upbringings, temperaments, and paths to the convent. However, in one wince-inducing maneuver, he uses a cartoonish Russian passenger (who wears a sable hat and coat and drinks copious amounts of vodka) to provide a crib sheet of the nuns' distinguishing characteristics, saying of Sister Barbara , 32, "You're the tall one"; of Sister Aurea, 23, "You're the short one"; of Sister Brigitta, 27, "You're the pretty one"; of Sister Henrica, 28, "You're the smart one"; and of Sister Norberta, 30, "You're the angry [one]?" We don't need those reminders, because this 240-page novel is not confusing or otherwise dull. And while everyone's fates are known beforehand, Hansen pays beautiful homage to each respective exile -- Hopkins and the five nuns.
Sister Henrica, in particular, is given new life in Hansen's prose. Like Hopkins, she's a poet, and many times we're treated to her tight-focus observations. "Along the deck the snow was gliding over the tarred planks in white wisps that between trailing and flying shifted and wimpled like so many silvery worms." A wimple is a nun's covering, arranged so only the face is exposed. Here it's used as a verb by Sister Henrica. Critic James Wood would call this free indirect style, when "we see things through the character's eyes and language but also through the author's eyes and language. We inhabit omniscience and partiality at once."
In his fiction and faith, Ron Hansen admits to partiality. He's unapologetic about the themes of his writing, because, as he sees it, religion and fiction seek a similar goal: the clarification of life. In the essay "Writing as Sacrament," he wrote, "[F]or religion and fiction have in common the unquenchable yearning to achieve the impossible, fathom the unfathomable, hold on to what is fleeting and evanescent and seen, in Saint Paul's words, 'as through a glass, darkly.' " --Cameron Martin
From 1996 to 2007, Cameron Martin was an award-winning feature writer, columnist, and book reviewer with the Greenwich Time and Stamford Advocate newspapers in Connecticut. He now freelances for Comcast SportsNet New England (covering the Red Sox) and for BugsandCranks.com, a web site dedicated to the lighter side of Major League Baseball. His short story "Once in Cassiopeia" -- about a woman who kills Osama bin Laden -- was published in Doublethink magazine.
From the Publisher
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.
The Washington Post -
Carolyn See
Here's this amazing book I'm going to tell you about; try to keep your mind off your grandmother's road trip. Forget that you might not be Catholic or that you've had it with the clergy or that you don't care about a 19th-century shipwreck or that you don't read poetry. Remember that although Ron Hansen wrote about the stigmata in Mariette in Ecstasy, he also wrote about the assassination of Jesse James by the dirty little coward Robert Ford. Instead of thinking about the upcoming election or whether you prefer blue cheese to ranch, unhinge your mind and let it trip, as we used to say in the '60s…And if you have the patience for Exiles, dear reader, you will perhaps glimpse the world, for a few days, with new eyes, and be reminded, as Hopkins writes, "There lives the dearest freshness deep down things."
Publishers Weekly
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) wrote some of the most beautiful and innovative poetry in English of the late 19th century. In Hansen's vivid fiction, Hopkins is a promising Oxford graduate who writes verse throughout college, converts to Roman Catholicism in his early 20s and takes church orders. Those acts ostracize him from his family and silence his poetry. In parallel with Hopkins's story, Hansen explores the event that jolts Hopkins back into writing in 1875: the sinking of the Deutschland -whose victims include five Catholic nuns exiled from Germany by Bismarck-at the mouth of the Thames. Delivering a deft blend of literary biography and disaster tale, Hansen (Mariette in Ecstasy , etc.) wrings a white-knuckled drama out of the lives of the poet/priest and five extraordinary German women, who were headed to St. Louis, Mo., to lead the American branch of their order. As for Hopkins, his poetry is poorly received for its unconventionality, and his Jesuit superiors punish him for his "oddities" (Hansen steers clear of Hopkins's sexuality). Hansen finds in the difficult paths of six remarkable people the pursuit of "a tranquil, soothing God of intimacy and tolerance and unquenchable love." Fans of Hopkins's verse will cherish the chance to revisit the astonishing 280-line "The Wreck of the Deutschland," reprinted as a coda. (May)
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Kirkus Reviews
An exquisite, elegiac novel about Gerard Manley Hopkins's composition of the poem "The Wreck of the Deutschland," as well as the five nuns whose death in the wreck inspired it. The novel opens at St. Beuno's School of Theology in northern Wales, where Hopkins is studying in the final years of his Jesuit training. He reads of the Deutschland maritime catastrophe in the London Times and almost immediately begins the struggle, after ten years of silence, to articulate the depth of his feeling about this event. The narrative focuses on Hopkins's production of the poem and on the nuns from Germany forced into exile by Bismarck's anti-Catholic laws barring religious orders. While little is known historically about the lives of the Franciscan nuns, Hansen (Isn't It Romantic: An Entertainment, 2003, etc.) constructs plausible life stories in loving detail. In flashbacks we also learn of Hopkins's initial crisis of faith, his conversion to Catholicism (which Hopkins saw as a corrective to "the triviality of this life") and his subsequent estrangement from his family. Along the way Hansen uses excerpts from Hopkins's letters and journals and also cleverly inserts into the novel images from Hopkins's poetry-the "gear and tackle and trim" of the transatlantic steamer, for example, or a Rhine Valley landscape that is "plotted and pieced" with farms. Because we know what will happen to the Deutschland, the novel has a tone of doomed inevitability as we learn of the nuns' optimistic plans to restart their conventual life in Missouri after the journey. The title refers not just to the status of the nuns but also to Hopkins himself, exiled from ever feeling fully at home in this world. A glorious workabout tragedy, creativity and literal and metaphorical shipwrecks.
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