In an extended dialogue between Marilynne Robinson and Barack Obama, published a few years ago in the New York Review of Books, Obama homes in on the dimension of Robinson’s writing that makes her so unusual as a 21st-century literary figure. “You’re a novelist,” he observes, “but you’re also – can I call you a theologian? Does that sound, like, too stuffy? You care a lot about Christian thought.”
This could be described as something of an understatement. Robinson wears her faith on the sleeves of most of her books. In the epic Gilead series, which brought her a Pulitzer prize and worldwide renown, she probes with gentle but forensic subtlety into the religious preoccupations – and doubts – of two fictional midwest pastors. More recently, in collections of essays such as What Are We Doing Here?, she combines theology with cultural commentary to explore what her vision of a Christian humanism might contribute to a politically polarised, divided, 21st-century west.
In her latest religious study, Robinson pursues this project by going back to the very beginning – to Genesis, the first book of the Bible. Most of us have at least a hazy idea of the contents of this ancient text, from God’s creation of the world in six days to the dramatic exiling of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, and the subsequent two-by-two salvage operation of Noah’s ark. Robinson takes it to have been written as a kind of origin story for a liberated nation, after the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt. In luminous prose she challenges a modern reader to understand just how unusual a book Genesis is, pregnant with meaning that stretches to our own day.
Robinson illustrates how the ancient Hebrew authors borrowed liberally from the Babylonian mythologies created by their near-east neighbours. But with a crucial distinction. Great narratives such as the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Enuma Elish feature fickle, rivalrous deities who turn their ruthless gaze on mortals only when it serves their interest. In stark contrast, Genesis portrays a troubled love story between humanity and a divine creator who is described as, extraordinarily, “having created man in his own image”.
The vision of a single omniscient and benevolent God is a staggering new departure in ancient literature, with implications all the way down to design details. In the Garden of Eden, Robinson points out, “the beauty of the trees is noted before the fact that they yield food”. Here is a world packed with signs of a divine desire that the first humans feel at home. Compared with the surrounding myths on offer, this vision “is from the beginning an immeasurable elevation of status”.
It all goes wrong, of course, as a highly ill-advised decision to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil leads to disaster and banishment. Robinson deftly guides the reader through Genesis’s account of how human history proper, red in tooth and claw, gets under way as God tries to keep faith with his errant creations. Seminal episodes such as Cain’s murder of Abel, the razing of Sodom and Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac – the son the old patriarch waited so long to see – are interpreted with a novelist’s eye for drama. The sections dealing with Joseph’s treacherous brothers are a psychological tour de force, as this guilt-ridden crew descend into a spiral of angst after selling their father’s favourite son into Egyptian slavery.
But the point is that God works in mysterious ways. The brothers’ heinous act later proves providential when Joseph, having become one of the most powerful men in Egypt, is able to rescue the Israelites from famine. By refusing to leave the really ugly human stuff out, Robinson suggests, the ancient scribes produced a book “not primarily meant to offer examples of virtue or heroism… but meant instead to trace the workings of God’s loyalty to humankind through disgrace and failure and even crime”.
More than two millennia later, beyond the poetic and literary fascination of the text, can this narrative say anything meaningful to a secular mind? Robinson implies that it can, at a gloomy moment when “the natural order and the social order are fraying together”.
In the face of contemporary atrocities, geopolitical strife and the threat of human-made environmental catastrophe, a work championing the goodness of creation and the infinite value of human life can offer a salutary read, calling us to our responsibilities. And in the ancient rabbis’ account of a merciful God who refuses to write his people off in spite of everything, Robinson finds a way to produce a powerful meditation on hope at a time when that virtue is generally in short supply.
For many fans of Robinson’s novels, such ruminations may fall outside their conceptual comfort zone. But for devotees of the Gilead series, Reading Genesis also serves as one of the best primers they will get for the theological world of its protagonists, the Reverends John Ames and Robert Boughton. In Gilead, as he senses death approaching, Ames vainly tries to imagine heaven but can’t get past the first base of feeling simple awe for the world he is still in. “Each morning,” he writes in a letter intended to be read one day by his young son, “I’m like Adam waking up in Eden, amazed at the cleverness of my hands and at the brilliance pouring into my mind through my eyes.” In this rich and provoking study, Robinson has masterfully traced that sense of wonder back to its ancient, remarkable source.
Reading Genesis by Marilynne Robinson is published by Virago (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
