Ron Hansen’s Mariette in Ecstasy (1991) is an unusual
book in both format and content, which may explain why it took four years or so
before it was published in UK (my paperback, 1995).
I bought the book as I
thought it might help in my research endeavours for The Bread of Tears (see below), but as it happens I’d amassed enough material
to progress my Sister Rose novel so this book stayed on my shelf unread for many years.
Finally, I got round to reading it.
Hansen writes in the present
tense, and the point of view is omniscient, which seems apt considering the
subject matter is the religious life in a convent. It begins as though it was a
poem:
Upstate New York.
August 1906.
Half-moon and a wrack of grey clouds…
Wallowing beetles in green pond water.
Toads.
Cattails sway and unsway.
Grape leaves rattle and settle again…
Wooden reaper. Walking plough. Hayrick.
Mother Celine gracefully walking, head down.
Crickets.
Mooncreep and spire.
Ears are flattened to the head of a stone panther
water-spout…
… and so on…
Each separated by a
scene-change space. Fortunately, these spaces do not contain the usual three
asterisks; if they did, the pages would be peppered with them to distraction.
Some scene shifts are only three lines of text, others one line. The shifts may
be necessary as the point of view moves from one character to another: there
are thirty-five nuns listed, their ages from 17 (Mariette) to 75.
Mariette is a postulant nun,
the younger sister of the Reverend Mother Céline, 37; their father is the local
doctor. Mariette’s beautiful and seems perfect in every way, a good
hard-working pupil. And then she begins to bleed from hands, feet and side: genuine
stigmata or a hoax? The various inhabitants of the convent are divided, some
believing devoutly, others distrustful.
Hansen’s prose is in many
ways like a screenplay, especially in the chosen tense, the visual descriptions
and the scene shifts. A few critics point to the writing being ‘precious’; though
I didn’t find it so: poetic in places, certainly. He masterfully captures the
period, the daily life of a convent and its claustrophobic atmosphere. His
powers of description put the reader there. Take, for example, two glimpses:
She sees cracked, parched lips and a trace of sour
yellow; a forehead as hot, perhaps , as candle wax; frail eyelids that are
redly lettered with tiny capillaries; green veins that tree and knot under the
skin of her hands. (p91)
Mariette is giving her father the attention she would
give a magician. She has imagined him through childhood as the king of a
foreign country, but he has changed into a too-heavy man with a glossy moustache
and unhealthy white nails and grey cinders of skin blemishes on his
winter-reddened face…. (p96)
While not an easy read, with
an inconclusive ending, it is a compulsive story. Across the Pond the book has
garnered much praise and many favourable reviews over the years.
Ron Hansen is also the author
of The Assassination of Jesse James by
The Coward Robert Ford (1985), the film being released in 2007. Mariette
in Ecstasy was filmed (1996) but was not given a wide release.
***
The Bread of Tears
When she was a cop, she made their life hell.
Now she’s a nun, God help them!
Before taking her vows,
Sister Rose was Maggie Weaver, a Newcastle policewoman. While uncovering a
serial killer, she suffered severe trauma, and after being nursed back to
health she becomes a nun. In her new calling she is sent to London to run a
hostel for the homeless. Here, she does good works, and also combats prejudice
and crime.
As she attempts to save a
homeless woman from a local gang boss, events crystallise, taking her back to
Newcastle, the scene of her nightmares, to play out the final confrontation
against drug traffickers, murderers and old enemies in the police.
She finds her spiritual self
and a new identity. She is healed through faith and forgiveness. It’s also
about her surviving trauma and grief – a triumph of the human spirit, of good
over evil.
This is a gritty and at times downright gruesome thriller. Written in
the first person, Morton has achieved a true sense of feminine appeal in
Maggie, the narrator, and despite her religious calling, she comes over as
quite a sexy woman… I found myself totally empathising with this full-blooded,
gutsy woman... All the characters and horrific events in this crime thriller
are extremely visual and well-drawn, making this a riveting read. It would make
a brilliant TV series! – Jan Warburton, author of The Secret, A Face to Die
For
The Bread of Tears is available as a paperback and an e-book here.
