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Executive Times |
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2008 Book Reviews |
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Exiles
by Ron Hansen |
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Rating: |
**** |
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(Highly Recommended) |
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Click
on title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Hop Ron
Hansen’s new novel, Exiles,
displays the wide range of his literary talent. Hansen is the Gerard Manley
Hopkins S.J. Professor of the Arts and Humanities in the English Department
of Santa Clara University. In Exiles,
he presents Hopkins as an exile: no longer writing poetry, and missing Wales
while he lives in Dublin. After reading newspaper accounts of the shipwreck of
the S.S. Deutschland on a sandbar in December 1875, Hop sees what happened to
other exiles: the death at sea of five German nuns who were banished from
their homeland by Bismarck and on their way to a new life in America. Both
Hop and the nuns are also exiled from their true home with God. Hopkins
returned to poetry after reflecting about all this, and wrote his epic poem,
the 35 stanza, 280 line work, The Wreck of the Deutschland. Hansen pulls all
this together in the novel in ways that explore the big questions of faith
and commitment. Here’s an excerpt, pp. 14-16: Raisin cakes and Earl Grey tea
were served in the gymnasium-sized refectory at five, and then Hopkins went
to the scholastics' recreation room to see if The Times was
available. It was. And he took it with him as he joined a "circle"
of Joe Rickaby, Bill Dubberley, and Clement Barraud for an examination
review in moral theology. Sydney Smith, an architect and the convert son of
an Anglican clergyman, perused his notebook and reminded them, "We have
seen that a passion—whether commotio, permotio, concitatio, or perturbatio—is
nothing other than a movement of the soul caused by the sensate
apprehension of a particular good or evil object and accompanied by an
organic mutation." Smith continued with his class
notes, but Hopkins instead read the six columns on page 6 that were dedicated
to "The Loss of the Deutschland." Readers were reminded that just
seven months earlier the Schiller, another German transatlantic liner,
wrecked on the Scilly Isles, southwest of Land's End, England, and three
hundred twelve lives were lost, "a coincidence of calamities which at
present there is no reason for thinking other than fortuitous." The
owners of the Deutschland, the North German Lloyd Company, were their
own insurers, up to now a sound economic decision, for there had not been a
passenger lost at sea in their fleet since the initial voyage in 1856. The Liverpool
Underwriters' Book of Iron Vessels was consulted for the ship's precise
length, depth, width, and tonnage. The writer presumed the captain of the Deutschland
wanted to avoid the shoals of the Dutch coast with a more westerly course
that instead sent the steamship too close to the shoals of the Thames
estuary. There was just one propeller, and that was lost and unserviceable
soon after the ship struck at five on the morning of December 6th. When at high tide that night
there was flooding in steerage and the upper decks, the passengers were
ordered up onto the masts and spars. "In that cold and terrible night
between Monday and Tuesday," the correspondent wrote, "many unhappy
persons must have lost their hold upon the rigging and fallen numbed into the
sea." Quartermaster August Bock's sail-aided lifeboat washed ashore near
the Royal Navy barracks at Sheerness, and he was being skillfully rendered
treatment by Staff Surgeon Flanagan, while the cold-blackened remains of his
two boat mates awaited undertaking in the Duke of Clarence Hotel. A long list
of survivors and "missing, presumed dead" was published. It was
noted that the sea-swollen corpse of Adolf Forster, whose ticket number was
52, had just floated ashore at Margate. There
were no photographs, of course, so one's imagination took over, and Hopkins
found himself getting queasy. But that was all that he had time to skim
anyway, for that Thursday night he needed to swot, as they'd said at Oxford,
the tiring textbooks for five hour-long lectures the next day, all conducted
in Latin. Moral theology was the most technical subject, and Hopkins used up
all the coals in his scuttle scrutinizing a treatise on Contracts and
memorizing the meanings of emphyteusis, laudemium, mohatra, antichresis,
hypotheca, and servitus activa et passiva—which he would have
guessed concerned slavery, but instead concerned easement to properties. Hop
keeps coming back to the stories about the shipwreck, and Hansen crafts with
great care the impact and action that followed. An added bonus for readers is
the inclusion of The Wreck of the Deutschland in the appendix. I highly
recommend Exiles. Steve
Hopkins, July 18, 2008 |
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Go to Executive Times Archives |
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The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the August 2008 issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Exiles.htm For Reprint Permission, Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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