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Exiles: A Novel

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After reading Ron Hansen's 1992 Mariette In Ecstasy, I thought: "This is it. This is the peak of his career as a novelist. Hansen will never be able to top this."

I was wrong. His new novel, Exiles, a curious and effective combination of novel and biography, is the best thing he's done to date. It left me breathless.

In the novel, Hansen cuts back and forth between the lives and death of the wonderful, bewildering, and innovative poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, and five German Franciscan nuns, America-bound, who perished when the "Deutschland" hit a sandbar off the British coast in the dead of winter. Hopkins was so moved by the newspaper accounts of their death that he wrote a long, 35-stanza poem, "The Wreck of the Deutschland," reflecting on their unhappy end.

In Exiles, Hansen speculates about why Hopkins was so affected by the accident. His suggestion is sensitive and nuanced. Hopkins feels a connection with the nuns because all of them are exiles, both literally and spiritually. Literally, the nuns are exiled from their German homeland because of the anti-Church laws pushed through by the Iron Chancellor Bismarck; Hopkins is exiled from his beloved Wales to Dublin, a locale he hated and which in many ways contributed to his early death. Spiritually, all six of the characters are exiles from their true home, God. They're thrust into "a world sour with sinning. Exiles, then, not from Germany, not from Europe, but from Paradise, from Heaven" (p. 192).

There is, however, a darker exilic theme in the novel expressed most explicitly in something one of the doomed nuns says: "We sometimes seem God's playthings. The dice he rolls" (p. 186). How to make sense of a shipwreck which destroys the good and the evil, the innocent and the guilty, alike? How to understand arbitrary orders from religious superiors that exile a brilliant poet like Hopkins to a thankless and spirit-breaking assignment? How to deal with the thousand-and-one gratuities of existence that make life seem to be pointless, directionless, meaningless? In our frequently desperate search for coherency and order in a frequently chaotic, indifferent world, we feel ourselves to be orphans and exiles.

A brilliant and haunting novel. Highly recommended.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, a poet almost unknown in his own lifetime, is the most experimental and most challenging of the Victorian writers. Abandoning "the cloying poetry, sentimentality, and forced rhymes" of his contemporaries, in favor of the "sprung rhythms" of Anglo-Saxon poetry, Hopkins hoped to "recreate the native and natural stresses of speech." A convert to Catholicism, Hopkins joined the Society of Jesus in 1868, and he soon determined that he must give up writing poetry to avoid earthly distractions from his priestly duties.

The wreck of the Deutschland, a passenger vessel going from Germany to New York in December, 1875, and the consequent deaths of five young nuns who were passengers, however, moved him to write a 35-stanza memorial which is among the most "modern" poems of the era. Imagining the nuns' deaths by drowning in frigid waters off the coast of England, Hopkins recreates their religious torments as they face their deaths in the roiling sea. "The Wreck of the Deutschland" (included here as an Appendix), regarded as Hopkins's most important long poem, was never published in his lifetime, even in the Catholic journal to which he submitted it, and it was almost lost forever.

Ron Hansen, the immensely versatile author of Mariette in Ecstasy, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Hitler's Niece: A Novel, and Atticus: A Novel, among other titles, examines the nature of faith, the need for love and acceptance, and the isolation of the exile as he develops two story lines and numerous characters. Hopkins, his family, Jesuit colleagues, and friends are depicted from his earliest decision to convert to the Roman Catholic faith, until his death, roughly twenty years later, in 1889. The stories of the five nuns, which alternate with the sections on Hopkins, depict their childhoods and acceptance of their religious vocations, then expand to include their forced exile from Germany and their experiences on the Deutschland.

Hansen's careful recreations, based on impeccable scholarship, take on life and power here, and even the horrifying images of the foundering Deutschland reflect a kind of ghostly magnificence. Imagery is compressed, as it is in Hopkins's poetry, and the gale facing the Deutschland contrasts starkly with the summer weather that Hopkins experiences during much of his story. The crises of faith faced by the nuns and by Hopkins unite the novel by providing a shared experience.

Because the novel is based on real people and real events, however, there is little room for Hansen to soar into his own creative realm without carrying along the baggage of history, frozen in time, and devoutly religious readers will probably identify more directly with the agonizing questions of faith than will more agnostic readers. Hansen is a remarkable writer who creates intensely dramatic scenes, however, and this novel, filled with vibrant detail and raw emotion, will fascinate many lovers of literary fiction and carefully developed historical characters and events. n Mary Whipple

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Even if you have never heard of Gerard Manley Hopkins, the Victorian-era Jesuit poet whose misunderstood and underappreciated work would revolutionize the art, or the tragic wreck of the ship called "The Deutschland," an event which proved to be the inspiration for Hopkins's greatest work, you need to read this gorgeous, beautifully written, marvelously composed book. Hansen, author of the luminous "Mariette in Ecstasy," the gripping "Atticus," the dark "Hitler's Niece, and the lighthearted "Isn't It Romantic," is one of this country's greatest stylists, and his astonishing new novel will open your eyes to questions of faith, creativity, friendship, commitment and suffering. I read this book last night in one sitting, and plan to do exactly the same thing again today.

This is a wonderful book about the poet Gerard M. Hopkins and how he came to write the Wreck of the Deutchland, along with the story of the Franciscan Sisters whose death in that shipwreck so moved Fr. Hopkins. I enjoyed this book for several reasons. First, Ron Hansen is just such a fine writer. All of his books are so well done, and this one especially was very touching, truly looking at the deepdown things, as Hopkins might have said. In a strange way, the story of the sisters parallels that of Hopkins -- the sisters died so terribly in the freezing water and wind, playthings of God it seemed. In another way, this is also true of Hopkins. In so many ways this man of genius was misunderstood, unrewarded, lived in a cold world that didn't seem to have many rewards. Like the nuns, he just puts what hope he has in God. But somehow, this all works together in this book to leave me with a calm sense of hope. I recommend this book without reservation. It is just great.

Reading Ron Hansen is diving into deep waters. I've been recommending his novels for a number of years and occasionally readers return to me frustrated with some of his tougher novels like the provocative, "Hitler's Niece."

"Hitler" isn't a great first choice for most readers. One woman who started there told me, "I think you're mistaken about this guy. I couldn't finish his Hitler book and I'll never read another one."

Ever since Brad Pitt starred in the movie version of Hansen's "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford," I've encountered the opposite problem. That movie was so slow that people are leery of a novelist who they suspect may be - well, boring.

Quite the opposite. Some passages in Hansen's books are downright page turners, including portions of this new novel about the 19th-Century Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose life is changed when he learns the news of a tragedy at sea.

Here's the key to Hansen's novels: Themes in his overall body of work are like literary demonstrations of Frederick Buechner's central theological affirmation: Fundamentally, we tell our stories because we have a deep yearning to participate in a far greater story. Whatever terrible secrets we think we are concealing, we soon discover that they weave themselves into this far, far larger narrative. And, in telling those stories, ultimately, we find ourselves in a community not only with other storytellers, but with the ultimate Storyteller.

That's the best recommendation I can give to Hansen's work. And also, it's my suggestion on how to read Hansen. Start with this fascinating new novelized slice of biography. This tale from the life of Hopkins, the hauntingly eloquent 19th-Century Catholic poet, is a perfect Hansen theme (and Buechner fans would argue a subject that's resonant with Buechner's central themes as well).

Hopkins' complex poetry has inspired countless men and women for more than 100 years - and yet his own troubling search for faith led him to make some strange decisions in his life. Plus, the water metaphor in this review is appropriate, because this novel also explores the spiritual impact of a famous shipwreck that killed a group of exiled German nuns. The wreck had an indelible impact on Hopkins' life and, through him, it now echoes through Hansen's novel to have an impact on the larger world even to this day.

But don't judge this novelist - or his life's cycle of stories - until you've paddled around in his waters for a while and sampled more than this single book. For further swimming, I would strongly recommend "Atticus" and "Mariette in Ecstasy."

Ron Hansen, the Gerard Manley Hopkins S.J. Professor of the Arts and Humanities in the English Department of Santa Clara University, has astutely blended two narratives: the story of a reluctant poet and the shipwreck of the S.S. Deutschland on Dec. 6-7, 1875.

While 155 passengers and crew were rescued, 64 lives were lost, among them five Roman Catholic nuns: Henrica, Aurea, Norberta, Barbara, and Brigitta, Sisters of Saint Francis, Daughters of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, banished from Germany by an edict of Otto von Bismarck.

On taking his vows as a Jesuit priest, Gerard Hopkins (1844-1889) had burned his early poetry, believing his worldly hobby detracted from his religious vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience.

Deeply impressed, however, by the disaster in the Thames River estuary, Hopkins, inspired by his poetic muse, penned an epic ode (35 stanzas, 280 lines), "The Wreck of the Deutschland."

Literary critic Robert Hughes, to whom a great deal is owed in preserving Hopkins' poetry, was critical of Hopkins' "exaggerated Marianism ... or the naked encounter of sensualism and asceticism."

However, a later critic, F. R. Leavis, esteemed Hopkins as "the only influential poetic of the Victorian age, and he seems to me the greatest."

Although Hopkins' poetry is notoriously esoteric and opaque, scattered through his oeuvre are lines of astonishing beauty, as in "The Wreck of the Deutschland," which is included as a coda in this novel.

Moving and heartbreaking, Exiles is a brilliant work of art that chronicles the spiritual pilgrimage not only of five Franciscan sisters but also of a tortured poetic genius.

Exiles, by Ron Hansen

I `m excited to review this book, because Hansen has been one of my favorite writers for a decade. His literary interests have been eclectic, and his skill at writing is something of an inspiration. He's moved from literary westerns to medieval religious culture and persecution, to Hitler's Third Reich, and then to a romantic comedy in his previous book, Isn't It Romantic?
Writers who move so nimbly between genres should be praised to the literary heavens but, sadly, Hansen's readers and reviewers do little more than grumble about his genre changes. Which is probably why he hasn't been able to maintain the following his writing deserves.

Exiles is Hansen's first since Romantic, which was published in 2003. If you haven't guessed from the very rough summation of his writing above, Hansen seems fascinated with history as a subject for fiction. And he seems to have a more than ordinary interest in Catholicism as a sub-culture of Western society. With Exiles, he gives us a moment in history, overlain by its effect on European Catholicism, and throws in a bit of literary history in the bargain.

Exiles is really three stories: the life of Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, the wreck of the German ship Deutschland (which carried five nuns escaping religious persecution in Bismarck's Germany), and the poem Hopkins wrote about the event, The Wreck Of The Deutschland.

I hadn't realized how ambitious such a simple-sounding project could be until I began reading the book. And it appears the inherent difficulties in weaving these three themes into a coherent story seduced Hansen a bit as well.
The book begins with Hopkins as a sometime-poet, all-the-time young Jesuit. He reads of the wreck, then reads deeper, probably morbid with fascination about the five nuns' deaths and the details of the wreck. Then he moves to the nuns and their personal histories, alternating huge chunks of narrative about Hopkins. Finally, he presents in dazzling prose the nuns' ill-fated escape from Germany.
Giving the reader such huge slabs of disparate narrative made this reader wonder at Hansen's focus. The book seems to stop and start several times, without a sense of novelistic continuity. It would seem a more coherent story to have braided these pieces in smaller segments.
But not to worry. The second half makes the book worthwhile. His interweaving becomes tighter, and we see the eloquence that first drew me to be Hansen's fan. Some examples--all from his depictions of the shipwreck tragedy-- that wow me:

"The ship had become an island of affliction and torture as a snowfield of sea foam washed over the quarterdeck, stealing whatever it could..."

"The ship groaned in its overweight of water. An injured elephant noise."

"Wind or wetness snuffed five of the six tapers, so that there was only a mist of yellow light in the gloom of the saloon."

Admittedly, Hansen's pushing the envelope here, but it's not purple prose. He uses such narrative moments to amplify the emotional backdrop of the wreck--and they work.

His historical purpose here is clearly to depict Otto von Bismarck's attempted eviction of Catholics from Germany, this setting the stage for the Third Reich's deeper discriminations. If one were to go deeper into Hansen's intent here, one might also sense a feeling of history's vagaries. The unpredictability of life also affected Hopkins, forcing him to work in obscurity (perhaps the way Hansen has). Hopkins' good friend Robert Bridges became England's Poet Laureate, and the preserver of Hopkins' work. Ironically, Hopkins's literary stature grew in subsequent years, while Bridges' waned.
Such is the condition of creative writing: one makes choices that bring fame and fortune in one's lifetime; others, perhaps truer to their art, eschew fame in the moment, only to gain literary stature beyond their lifespans.

It's also interesting to compare the history of the Deutschland wreck to Hopkins' long poem to Hansen's broader account. From such comparison we can only conclude that such fact-based literary perspectives create something separate from history, perhaps art's alternative reality--the one literary theory constantly struggles to explain.

I so wanted to enjoy this book. I have often been inspired by books about the religious life such as most recently GILEAD and HOME by Marilynne Robinson. The story of five young German nuns, exiled from their country only to be drowned in a shipwreck off the English coast in 1875, could not fail to be moving. And "The Wreck of the Deutschland," Gerard Manley Hopkins' great elegy on the disaster is not only one of the greatest religious poems ever written, but also the first in which his astounding poetic invention emerged full-blown, in incandescent lines such as these: "I did say yes | O at the lightning and lashed rod; | Thou heardst me truer than tongue confess | Thy terror, O Christ, O God."

But what can the novelist add to the words of a writer who made language his sword? He can tell the story in more understandable terms, and in this Hansen certainly succeeds. He can place the poem in the context of Hopkins' life as a scholastic studying to become a Jesuit priest, but there are numerous biographies of Hopkins already. He can invent personalities and back-stories for the nuns, of whom little but their names are known, and here he is more truly the novelist. But the sequence of back-to-back character sketches near the beginning of the book is too expository, too compressed. The nuns appear as admirable young women, likeably human, but there is no time for them to emerge as memorable individuals before tragedy engulfs them. Still less can Hansen convey the all-compelling, irresistible power of a religious vocation -- at least not to compare with Hopkins' own confession: "The frown of his face | Before me, the hurtle of hell | Behind, where, where was a, where was a place? | I whirled out wings that spell | And fled with a fling of the heart to the heart of the Host."

My complaint is not so much that Hansen spends so much time in exposition, but that he is so obvious about it. He cannot have Hopkins open a copy of The Times without listing all the advertisements to be found on its first page. He has Hopkins talk for an entire paragraph about his former tutor at Oxford, Benjamin Jowett, solely to introduce a humorous bit of doggerel that would surely have been known to all his listeners. No sooner have the nuns gone on board than he has one of them is explain the origin of the English word "posh" (Port Out, Starboard Home), even though it makes no sense whatever in German! He does occasionally manage to convey something of Hopkins' feeling for landscape in passages like the following: "The air smelled cleansed; the leaden sky was topped with clouds; a blue bloom seemed to have spread upon the distant south, enclosed by a basin of hills. And again he felt the charm and instress of Wales." Beautiful -- but the use of the Hopkins-coined word "instress" without any explanation immediately makes the rest seem self-conscious and artificial.

Hopkins did not personally know the nuns; when they died, he was "Away in the loveable west | On a pastoral forehead in Wales." So it is important for the author to link them spiritually if not in fact. Other reviewers have suggested that Hopkins also saw himself as something of a spiritual exile. This is something that Hansen will develop later, but he does not go into the reasons for the nun's exile at the time, and he shows Hopkins flying high, the holder of a first-class Oxford degree, poised for success in the Jesuit order. A more likely reason for Hopkins' interest would be the question that, if the five women (and he himself) had given up everything for God, why does God appear to let them down? The point of belief that Hopkins proclaims with such struggle in this and many of his later poems, is the absolute mastery of God -- ESPECIALLY when He wields "the lightning and lashed rod."

Two-thirds of the way through the book, however, Hansen draws the two stories together, paradoxically by telling them in two different time-frames. He parallels the two-day ordeal of the nuns on the doomed ship with the twelve-year decline in Hopkins' fortunes until he died of enteric fever in Dublin in 1889. Now he is clearly an exile, barred from higher office as a priest, completely unknown as a poet, reduced to teaching Latin to fractious schoolboys in a distant land. The last fifty pages of Hansen's book are quite moving and attempt something that only a novelist can do. But they do not approach the power of Hopkins' own writing from these years: "O the mind, mind has mountains, cliffs of fall | Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap | May who ne'er hung there...."

Once again, Hopkins said it better.

EXILES by Ron Hansen is a novel which examines the mystical ties between the challenges experienced by poet and Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins and the deaths of five German nuns in sea disaster. Hopkins' poem "The Wreck of the Deutschland" is woven into the narrative. The first chapters of the book I found riveting for the realistic descriptions of Hopkins' life with the Jesuit scholastics; it was so beautifully written that every line needed to be savored. However, as the book progressed, other than the harrowing scenes of the sinking ship, it became more like a biography of Hopkins and less like historical fiction. Perhaps the author was trying to convey the sense of dryness and desolation of Hopkins' soul, I do not know.

The nuns are introduced in what resembled colorful Wikipedia entries so that the five women sort of ran together for me. The sisters are endearing, nevertheless; they are taken away from us just as we are really getting acquainted with them. They reminded me of nuns whom I have known in my own life. However, my dear nun friends would not quite approve of a sister looking at herself naked in the mirror, as Sister Henrica does in one rather odd scene. Not that the body is bad or shameful, but nuns are not supposed to be preoccupied with themselves, and looking at oneself naked in the mirror conjures up all kinds of thoughts, "I'm too fat, I'm too thin, I'm ugly, I'm beautiful" and most of the old-fashioned nuns were striving to be beyond all that. Perhaps European nuns in the nineteenth century had a different view of things, but I doubt it.

It is also out of place in Catholic art or literature for a nun to be shown nude, simply out of respect for the vocation of the bride of Christ. Our Lady, female saints, and nuns are generally not depicted in their nakedness, with a some exceptions, such as Eve, of course. The description in Exiles was in no way lewd or erotic; maybe the author wanted to demonstrate the sister unknowingly preparing for her baptism of pain and death. It was just one short paragraph, but a strange one.

The novel delves into the heart of self-offering to God and the utter immolation that is the result. The sisters die a violent death; Hopkins' death is slower but, like the nuns' final end, is caused indirectly by his consecration of himself in the religious life. One wonders if in the mysterious spiritual order of things, the sacrifice of the nuns obtained for Fr. Hopkins the grace to persevere in his vocation, to endure the contradictions of community life, the rejection by his parents, and the misunderstandings of his peers. Hopkins the poet was moved by the news of the passing of five women whom he had never met, moved enough to write a poem about them. Surely from Heaven they prayed for their spiritual brother, so that like them he died giving after giving his all. Hopkins was solitary but not alone, his sisters mystically stood at his side, even as Our Lady and the holy women stood at the foot of the cross of Christ. In spite of its unevenness and quirks, Exiles conveys the reality of the Communion of Saints, a reality which lies hidden behind the storms and sorrows of this world.

I just finished reading this very interesting book and encourage anyone who loves the works of Gerard Manley Hopkins, SJ to read it also. The author skillfully weaves the story of the five German sisters who died on the ship Deutschland with the story of the Jesuit poet, G.M. Hopkins, as he converted to Roman Catholicism, entered the Society of Jesus and wrote an epic poem about the shipwrecked deaths of the five sisters. The author sprinkles in many words or phrases that seem to come from Hopkins' poetic vocabulary and he fleshes out a story that shows the prolonged deaths of the five nuns who were coming to America to avoid anti-Catholic laws in Germany and to ultimately work in hospitals in the Midwest. Obviously, I love Hopkins' poetry and lately, I have become quite interested in Hopkins the person, wanting to know more about him, as he was a literary genius who lived a very obscure and ordinary type of life.