If you can't be bothered reading stories, I'm not sure pastoral ministry is a good idea for a vocation. I don't usually take the high ground like that, but there is something odd about saying "I'm called to ministry" while being disinterested in the narrative flows of human life, or complacent about the thickly textured existence that is human experience. Character, plot, tensions, resolutions, imagined encounters between people, with all their complexities of motive, meaning, and communication. Then too all the possibilities of misunderstanding, ignorance, hurt; these and many other features of the novel provide scenarios rich in hermeneutic possibility, forcing us to question and sympathise, to like and dislike, to care and not to care.
Pastoral ministry is a callling to enter the mess of human life, not as the great solver of problems, but as the companion and fellow traveller, the caring friend who knows when to shut up and when to interfere and risk the friendship itself. But even more, pastoral ministry, in its caring and accompanying actions, is a willingness to enter another person's story, and create a new complexity as their story and mine begin to be told together, in the exchanges and encounters and commitments that make up every serious relationship. Novels allow us to rehearse these.
Stories well told pull us into worlds where people and problems and hopes and fears, and all the brokennness and wholesomeness of life are opened up to sight. Tragedy and comedy, failure and achievement, fallibility and courage, moral anguish and spiritual longing, evil and good, diminishment and growth, the whole many-stranded fankle of human life in its complexificated messiness, are open to our eyes, displayed for our moral insight, and narrated not for our comfort in happy endings, but for our education in what it takes to be human. Novels are at their best when they challenge our assumptions, pull the rug from beneath our far too self-confident feet, and unnerve us by showing us our deeper and darker thoughts we are loathe to admit are there at all.
All of this Helen Dunmore's book does well. It is a story of betrayal and deceit, but also of faithfulness and loyalty. At the centre of the novel is a marriage tested to the limits by secrets, unspoken suspicions, perseverance in believing in someone who seems not to deserve such faithfulness. The nature of love and desire, the accidental ways in which we meet people and begin to care and to commit and to bind our own destiny to theirs is all told in the context of cold war politics, spying as a way of life, and then the betrayals that can sometimes be deliberate and devastating, or inadvertent, but still devastating. Making the novel more interesting are the legacies of previous relationships, the half-life of our histories as these continue to influence decisions, subvert moral principle and impinge on the central relationships in the lives of the protagonists.
A review shouldn't spoil the plot, tell the ending or in any other way compromise the storyteller's primary goal - to draw you into the story and keep you reading till the last sentence. So no more clues here; just the observation that in a culture riven by suspicion and fear as were the 1950's and early 60's, there are telling parallels to our own culture where fear of commitment and its costs and consequences are just as acute. What makes this novel important is the integrity in Dunmore's writing. At no point did she take the easy way of resolving the dilemmas that are inherent in human relationships, nor does she simplify or guarantee success in that desperate search of the human heart for a place to stand, to feel safe, or at least understood. Good novels deepen our understaning of others, school us in compassion for human weakness and longing, and remind us of our own flawed hopes, missed chances and moments of insight that are amongst our most expensive and enriching gifts.
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