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'Evensong' by Gail Godwin

Godwin plumbs marriage, faith

Sunday, March 07, 1999

By Rebecca Sodergren

	Evensong By Gail Godwin Ballantine Books $25.00

Gail Godwin is back, as good as ever. Unlike the John Grishams of the world, who churn out a book a year but lose some depth in the process, Godwin has been on a five-year hiatus since publishing “The Good Husband” in 1994.

You can’t expect a writer of this depth to crank out books at record speed unless you ask her to sacrifice quality. Godwin obviously is not willing to do so. For that, she’s gained a following — not as large as Grisham’s, but perhaps more intense.

Those who follow her will be particularly interested to hear that her latest book is a sequel to “Father Melancholy’s Daughter,” her acclaimed 1991 novel.

In that book, Margaret Gower was growing up motherless as the daughter of a small-town Episcopal priest. Her mother had run off to New York City with a friend who, of all things, designed theater pieces that mocked the church.

Before anyone could determine whether Mrs. Gower had left for good, she was killed in a car accident, leaving Margaret and her father — a somewhat anomalous character, a priest who battled depression — to pick up the pieces.

At the end of “Father Melancholy’s Daughter,” Margaret had begun to admire Adrian Bonner, a friend of her father and also an Episcopal priest.

At the beginning of the sequel, Margaret is married to Adrian, the campus priest and acting headmaster of a progressive boarding school. Margaret herself has also become a priest and is serving All Saints High Balsam, a parish with a reputation for being rich and old-fashioned — nicknamed “All Saints High Horse” by the surrounding community.

At the opening of the book, the Bonners’ marriage is under strain, largely as a result of Adrian’s job pressures and self-doubt. The whole book plumbs the depths of the couple’s relationship, realistically capturing the complexity of the marriage bond.

A mysterious brother from a monastery shows up and invites himself to stay at the Bonners’ house. A religious zealot organizes a “Millennium March for Jesus” and tries to pressure Margaret into signing up her parish. One of Adrian’s charges at the school goes astray, is expelled and comes to live with the Bonners.

In every circumstance, we see not only how the events affect Margaret, the narrator, but how they affect her perception of the marriage.

One of Godwin’s greatest strengths has always been exploring complex human relationships. In “The Finishing School” (one of my personal favorites, though not one of Godwin’s biggest critical successes), she chronicled the relationship between a teen-age girl and an older neighbor woman whom she nearly idolized — until the neighbor did something that made the teen feel betrayed.

In “The Good Husband,” she tackled two marriage relationships — a happy one between a strong-willed woman dying of cancer and her meek-and-mild husband, and a tenuous one between a younger couple.

In Godwin’s books her female characters are more roundly drawn and action-oriented than the more cerebral males. The fact that the women often take more defined action gives her writing a feminist bent.

In this case, that bent is stronger because Godwin is dealing with a woman priest. It’s obvious that she’s trying to make a statement here; some of Margaret’s parishioners have trouble accepting her, and Godwin doesn’t paint that resistance in a positive light.

But the author makes an even stronger statement about society — whether intended or not — in the figure of Margaret herself, a priest who’s aggressive and sure of herself, but not so sure about who God is and how humans should relate to Him.

Godwin’s characters are complex, but that doesn’t leave her book short on plot — especially as the story builds toward its end, when the Millennium March, a source of considerable tension throughout, and a shocking accident that endangers several main characters occur on the same day.

Sequels, whether movies or books, rarely live up to the originals. Not so in this case; I doubt that fans of the first will be disappointed in the grown-up Margaret.