Seven Reasons to Read this Novel
1 Gail Godwin never writes a bad novel. Some writers become established and it seems the publisher wants a regular flow of new work. The result is that every now and then I've been disappointeds. Anne Tyler and Salley Vickers are two examples of writers who sometimes have left me disappointed, though that's because at their best they are so very good. Godwin is not a novel a year writer, and some of her best were a long time in gestation. Grief Cottage is by Godwin standards, and in my judgement, a 7 out of 10 novel.
2 The title could be a turn off, the novel equivalent of the tragic lives genre of biography and autobiography. But no. This is a book woven around mystery, friendship across generations, the story of a young boy's view of a world that can be both tragic and magic. The title indicates the emotional range of the novel – but remember, grief when it is lived through in the richness of life and in the orbit of affirming relationships, is a process pulling the grieving towards the freedom to live again. This is not a denial of loss, anguish and heartbreak, it is an exploration of how these change the people we are.
3 The characters are drawn and developed throughout the story and they contribute to the novel as people with their own stories, and their personal and private history of grief and its afterlife in their lives. Each of the main characters is a human being living with the inner conflicts, complex motives, emotional hungers, need for the assuaging of loneliness, and the joys of embracing and being embraced by those who care; and in that complex nexus of human experience, they help to shape each others' future by helping them deal with the past.
4 The plot is both credible and incredible, depending on how you read the story, which in turn depends on the expectations and assumptions the reader brings. There is an element of the supernatural, or at least the paranormal. But as the story unfolds within the mind and reminisncences of the young boy who is the main protagonist, the reader begins to realise that in the mental and emotional distress of grief, all kinds of experiences can seem real. And perhaps they are. But how can you know? There are psychological ghosts that haunt us with remorse, loss, anxiety and our desperate need of a self we can live with.
5 This is a novel about hurt and healing, about suppressed memories that hurt us and the struggle to expose them and find some sort of healing in the coming to terms. Each person in this story has their wounds, and one or two of them are wounds that need cleansing and rebinding, a process not without pain but with the promise of being able to live more fully, less fearfully, and with a hope of contentment or at least resolution. It is the kind of book people who care for others should read.
6 Scotland's First Minister is an avid reader of novels and an evangelist about the importance of novels as a way of widening experience, pushing back personal limnited horizons and creating empathy in situations the reader hasn't previously encountered or experienced. This is exactly that kind of novel. Without ever aiming at being didactic, Godwin writes with psychological precision and emotional wisdom about sorrow and recovery, loss and new gains, friendships that last and some that don't, about human love and how it ebbs and flows but at its best is constant and capable of the miracle of faithfulness.
7 In her Memoirs of a Writer, Godwin notes of someone else: "“When I was in seminary," Father Edward had told other guests around the table when he was purchasing his books, "my spiritual director told me not to read theology. 'Read novels,' he said, and I have.” Preachers and pastors, counsellors and chaplains, carers and indeed everyone who seeks to bring the riches of their own emotional, mental and spiritual lives into their ways of relating to and living amongst other people, will find the well told story a constant supply of insight, emotional intelligence, and spiritual direction and redirection. I have always known for myself that sustaining the life of the imagination is one of the prime directives of responsible Christian thought and action. Novels allow us to imagine situations we could never experience; to rehearse our responses to the joy and hurt, hope and despair, achievement and disappointment in the lives of other people and communities. By those criteria, Grief Cottage is a comfortable 7 out of 10. Well worth the reading.
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