![]() ![]() It is the story of Ames’s young wife, Lila, an enigmatic presence in the earlier books, both unsettling and reconciling, and it is cast as a third-person narration, carefully and strictly related from Lila’s own perspective. ![]() This third novel in the sequence is, in many ways, the most adventurous of all. ![]() The second is a third-person story told from the perspective of Glory, daughter of Ames’s clerical colleague Robert Boughton. The first of the books is a first-person narration and reflection by the ageing pastor John Ames, writing down the thoughts he wants to leave for his seven-year-old son. Marilynne Robinson’s three interrelated novels ( Gilead, Home and Lila) about a small Iowa town in the 1940s and 1950s all exhibit in exemplary ways this quality of allowing voices to be themselves. Bad novelists ventriloquise, good novelists allow the speakers they create to be other than their creator. One of the most important marks of a serious novelist is the capacity to create a diversity of consistent voices, voices we can hear as having an integrity of their own. ![]()
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