Lila [Amazon.com; Amazon.co.uk] begins with a neglected and as yet nameless child stolen away from a stoop under the cover of darkness. An itinerant worker named Doll sweeps down "like an angel in the wilderness", gathers the dirty, unloved wildcat of a child up into her arms and walks off with her into the night.
Taking refuge in the cottage of a sympathetic friend, the two women bathe the bruised and dirty child: “The old woman held her standing in a white basin on the floor by the stove and Doll washed her down with a rag and a bit of soap, scrubbing a little where the cats had scratched her, and on the chigger bites and mosquito bites where she had scratched herself, and where there were slivers in her knees, and where she had a habit of biting her hand. The water in the basin got so dirty they threw it out the door and started over.”
The women shear the child’s tangled, nit-ridden hair, “then they soaped and scrubbed her head, and water and suds ran into her eyes, and she struggled and yelled with all the strength she had and told them both they could rot in hell”.
This is the first of the baptisms in the book, the image of watery rebirths trickling through the text. “I been thinking about ‘Lila’. I had a sister Lila,” the old woman says soon after. “Give her a pretty name, maybe she could turn out pretty.”
“Maybe,” replies Doll. “Don’t matter.”
Readers familiar with Marilynne Robinson's previous two novels Gilead and Home will know that Lila doesn't turn out particularly pretty but Doll was right, it's of no matter. She grows up to become the younger, second wife of old Reverend John Ames – one of the (fictional) Iowa town of Gilead's two Protestant pastors, the lives of whose families are the subject of Robinson's trilogy.
Chronologically the action of Lila – Lila's arrival in Gilead, a town where dogs sleep in the sun in the road and "you could hear the cornfields rustling almost anywhere in it, they were so close and it was so quiet"; her and Ames's brief courtship, subsequent marriage and the birth of their child; all interwoven with the fragmented story of her nomadic past – happens before that of Gilead, which is set in 1957, and takes the form of a letter written by the 76-year-old Ames to his now 7-year-old son.
(Home, incidentally, runs parallel to Gilead, set in the household of Ames's friend and confidant, the Reverend Robert Boughton.)
To read Lila as the final piece in the puzzle is a different experience to reading it as a stand-alone novel. One could advocate either way as each bring their own rewards. To have read Gilead first is to have heard a slightly different version of Lila and Ames's courtship, but Ames is a romantic whereas Lila remains a pragmatist, something of the near-feral child she began life as having never quite left her (Lila is narrated in the third person but everything is filtered through the central character's consciousness). She has a wary eye for people, even those offering charity since she doesn't trust "nobody", not even her own husband, and her only dowry is a knife, passed down to her from Doll with a murdered man's blood on its blade.
Lila wanders into Gilead not expecting to linger there for long – she was brought up on the open road – so her and Ames’s marriage is as much as surprise to her as it is to him; at his age, this kind of second chance at life couldn’t be anything but. It turns out, however, that both their lives have been marked by loss and loneliness, and as much as the novel is about suffering and redemption, and faith in the face of an existence of “bitterness and fear” – “I’ve been tramping around with the heathens. They’re just as good as anybody, so far as I can see. They sure don’t deserve no hellfire,” Lila informs Ames – it’s also a study of precarity: of people living on the edge, exposed and unstable, emotionally as much if not more so as financially.
A conspicuous absence from this first year of American contenders for the Man Booker Prize, this novel has a sort of untamed savagery to it that sets it ablaze. Something of Lila’s own raw, uncultivated vitality runs through Robinson’s very prose and the result is magnificent.
Lucy Scholes is a freelance journalist who lives in London.
