Exiles ~ Ron Hansen

Ron Hansen’s Exiles combines the story of the Winter of 1875 shipwreck of the Deutschland and the life of English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. Hopkins was a young, budding poet who abandoned his art to become a Jesuit priest. It was the news of the shipwreck, with the loss of many lives, including those of five nuns, which jolted Hopkins creative juices back to life. The incident inspired his poem The Wreck of the Deutschland.

At the time there was a wave of religious intolerance toward Catholics in Germany, and the nuns were being ‘exiled’ to continue their work in America (see The May or Falk Laws). Hansen’s hook is that Hopkins felt a connection to them beyond their co-religiosity. To Hansen at least, Hopkins was an ‘exile; of sorts from his creative self.

Well. I don’t recall what prompted me to read this book. It probably came to my attention from a review. I;m not a reader of shipwreck fiction, but I am partial to fictional biographies – and I believe I was reading Fall of Frost, the fictional-hybrid account of the life of Robert Frost at the time. Both poet’s dontcha know.

The book did not impel me to delve into Manley’s poetry – mea culpa but not my cuppa from the snippets in the book (and my attempt to actually tread the poem itself, which was never published in his lifetime). The theology of the book held little interest for me either. I must say though, that the shipwreck itself (once it happened) was gripping reading and included some memorable scenes.

A squalling child was left behind and was knocked flat by the sea. With the next swell, Carl Dietrich Meyer thought, she would be gone. But then a gymnastic seaman rappelled down the steep cliff of the rigging, as agile and unafraid as a chimpanzee, and he was just twenty feet above the little girl when his foot caught in a lanyard and he plummeted headfirst. The sailor was secured to the yardarm by a legging, and in the sway of the mast he soared out over the sea upside down, and then gravity asked him back again in a glorious swing that ended when his neck struck a taut guy wire and his head was sliced off. The sea took the head as its own, but his body hung by its leg rope throughout the night, spilling blood and tolling the hours.

Whew! One or two other such gruesome scenes, but the way Hansen handled the deaths of the nuns was surely the best part of the book. And he does a creditable job of delineating the characters of the five sisters in the alternating sections of the book. Each is given a brief introduction to include some early biographical information and their decisions to dedicate their lives to the Church. On the other side, he closes out their lives individually in affecting prose.

For me though, this novel took far too long to takeoff, but finished off rather nicely.

♦♦♦⁄ ♦♦♦♦♦