Prose and Principalities

The promise and peril of the 'Christian novel.'

Frederick Buechner

How should a Christian write a novel? It's a question that occupies me these days. I am both a Christian and a novelist, and I haven’t yet worked out how to fit the two vocations together. For me, this is a mid-life problem. I became a Christian quite unexpectedly about five years ago in my late forties, after a long spiritual search through other traditions, having been brought up with none. Before that, though - long before that - I was a writer. Among my ten published books are three novels - a loose trilogy, one of which, The Wake (2014) was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and bagged a few other awards along the way.

I know how to write novels, then, more or less. Whether I know how to be a Christian is a different question. What I certainly don't know is how to be a 'Christian novelist' - or whether I even want to be. I can't remember which writer once prayed, on unexpectedly becoming Christian himself, Lord, thank you for making me a Christian. Just please don't make me a Christian writer. It seems a reasonable request, though. I understand it - though in my case, as evidenced by this Substack these days, the request has not been granted.

All of my novels, now that I look back on them from a distance, were religious in nature. All dealt, in different ways, with the struggle between humanity, its gods, and the natural landscapes in which they were embedded. One of my books was structured around a Buddhist template, though nobody noticed or was meant to. Another was quite explicitly pagan. But back then I was still wandering, or perhaps thrashing about on the ocean. Now I am in the harbour. How does one write stories from here?

The notion of 'Christian fiction' is problematic in the same fashion as is the notion of a 'protest song.' Consider: how many good protest songs have you ever heard, in comparison with the number of bad or terrible ones? I would be willing to bet that the latter list was a lot longer, and the reason is simple enough: polemic and poetry don't mix. Making a point or pushing an agenda sits very badly with the task of exploring the complexity of human being in all its fullness. Somebody who already has all the answers may be unwilling to dig very deeply into the pushes and pulls of the human soul. There may also be places they don't want to go, or consider themselves banned from exploring. This applies to the Marxist as much as to the Christian - and how many Marxist novels have you ever enjoyed?

C. S. Lewis once claimed that it was much harder to present the Christian story to a post-Christian culture than to a pre-Christian one, and today we can see how true this claim is. Where I come from, people are largely inoculated against Christianity, or what they imagine Christianity to be. The history, the cultural baggage, the half-formed prejudices: all of these are compounded by a stark lack of understanding of what the Christian Way really is. Recently I was admonished by an editor for making a reference to one of Jesus's well-known parables in an article I was writing. 'Young readers today', she said, 'won't understand the reference.' I was shocked. When I was young, we all knew these things even if we didn't believe them. No more. The shared stories we once took for granted are blowing away on the wind. For all of these reasons, a Christian who wants to write a novel which even touches on his or her faith faces a steep climb.

On the other hand, we can also see that in the culture as a whole, tides are turning and winds changing. The spiritual hunger of the young is increasing as the culture becomes more materialistic, atomised and lost. A novelist like Michel Houllebecq - no Christian he, though you sometimes get the impression he would like to be if he could only believe it - writes excoriatingly of the spiritual void at the heart of French culture. Irish novelist Sally Rooney, who is also very far from being religious, writes books which are full of Millennials and Zoomers arguing about life's meaning, or whether it even has one. Existential novels are hardly new, but there is a different edge now; almost, it feels, a desperation. Every year there seems less and less to cling on to.

How could a Christian write a novel in times like these, and what models might we have? Recently I read C. S. Lewis' Space Trilogy, which I thought was a brave attempt to disguise the Christian pattern of the universe in sci-fi clothing. Some of it was inspiring or intriguing: the treatment of space as heaven - literally - and the portrait of an Earth occluded by evil spirits and thus cut off from God since ancient times, offers up powerful images to the imagination. That Hideous Strength, the final novel in the trilogy, points at our current spiritual dilemma with perspicacity. Lewis's ambitious, grand sweep of a tale showed me how a conceptual trilogy about the spiritual realities of Heaven and Earth could be constructed. But the novels are dated now, as any book written about space exploration in the 1940s would be. They are novels of ideas written by an Oxford don almost a century ago. I enjoyed them, but there are different ideas in the air now, and it is a very different time.

And so, we come to Frederick Buechner.

Last year I was approached by the editor of the Buechner Review, a publication dedicated to the work of an author I had never heard of, and asked if I would write something for them. What they told me about him piqued my interest: Buechner was a novelist who had become a Christian - indeed, a Christian pastor - and then had to answer for himself the question of how to reconcile the two callings. So I said yes, and then I sat down with Buechner’s 1980 novel, Godric, which is a fictionalised account of the life of St Godric of Finchale. I was biased in the book's favour, given that I am myself currently retelling in miniature form the stories of some of the early Christian wilderness saints, but I had no idea what to expect. I wanted to see what this author would do with this story.

What he does is, in some ways, almost at the opposite end of the spectrum to the one that Lewis was inhabiting. While the Space Trilogy spreads itself over the widest vista imaginable, both literally and conceptually, Godric is a small book, in its scope if not its concerns - or its writing. Buechner sets out to tell the story of one obscure saint in one period of time in one particular place, and through that to illuminate the spiritual struggle that is the Christian Way. He does so, in my opinion, with great success. When I put this book down, I remember feeling like I had an answer to my question. This is one example of how to write a genuinely powerful Christian novel - or rather, a novel by and about a Christian which could be read just as easily by an atheist or a pagan, and appreciated for its storytelling ability and philosophical depth.

Oh, and it also has one of the best first lines I've read in fiction for many a year. Five friends I had, and two of them snakes. It is impossible not to read on after that.

This is a particular achievement because saints are perhaps the hardest human beings to write about. None of us knows what it's like to be one, and their reputation is fearsome. These people are so close to God, so other-worldly, that the paradoxical result on the page is often dullness. Medieval hagiographies do not give us a lot to work with. The saints portrayed within their pages are always paragons, with no sins but endless virtues. They never seem to have much of a sense of humour, and their single-minded focus on God alone makes them hard to reach even for those of who aspire to the same thing. We know that in reality meeting a saint would be an astonishing and life-changing experience. We also know that it is virtually impossible to convey this on the page to a cynical post-Christian, post-existentialist, post-everything audience. Or even to a Christian who enjoys novels. Novels, after all, are predicated on an examination of the inner life of the human being. How can any author reach the inner life of a saint - or make it interesting to the non-ascetic, which means most of us?

Buechner, it turns out, has an answer - or two answers. The first is that Godric does not think of himself as a saint at all (something which is true of every saint worth his salt, incidentally. The holier a man is, the more sinful he considers himself to be.) In fact, Buechner's Godric is almost fixated on the sins and misadventures of his pre-eremetic life. The real Godric, as far as we know, spent approximately half of his life 'in the world' and the other half alone in his woodland hermitage. Buechner's Godric spends his time in the woods thinking back to his pre-'saintly' life and condemning it, whilst also exhibiting, on occasions, a wistfulness towards the person he once was, but walked away from.

All of this, of course, allows Buechner to re-tell, in Godric's voice, the adventures of his youth, which are anything but saintly. This leads us to the second answer: the tale of poor Reginald. 'Reginald of Durham' is the real name of the author of Godric's hagiography. Here he is transformed into a wide-eyed, credulous, well-meaning youngster, desperate to tell the story of the holy man he is blessed to know. That holy man, meanwhile, spends much of his time either insulting his scribe or painting his own life story in the darkest possible terms. 'I am no saint', he keeps insisting to Reginald. Godric is instead, he proclaims, 'a gadabout within his mind, a lecher in his dreams. Self-seeking he is, and peacock proud. A hypocrite. A ravener of alms, and dainty too. A slothful, greedy bear.' This particular peroration makes Reginald cry - and, as we see, it turns out mostly to be true. But the louder Godric insists on his own corruption, the more Reginald seems to believe in his sanctity - and the more the reader warms to him. We all know his story, because at least some of it is ours.

Why does this book work? It could have been funny but shallow; it could have been irreligious or cynical; it could have been po-faced and dull. In fact it fizzes with life. All of Godric's self-lacerations, all of his stories, all of his sins - some of them sinful enough to lead to the death of others - only to serve to make his final holiness - and it is holiness, we are sure - more convincing. Godric has walked through the fire. He has met with the shade of St Cuthbert, he has tended to a hermit on the edge of sanity, he has sailed the oceans, committed theft, fraud, perjury, incest. He has, in a word, struggled. This is what the hagiographies miss: the struggles that make the saints so human. Or rather, if they don't miss them they do not delve into them in any interior depth, because their authors are writing edifying literature for the faithful, not modern novels.

Modern novels like this one, meanwhile, must have their saints riven with self-doubt on occasion, as every saint must surely have been. 'What sort of hermit can he be who has a heart that gads about the very world he's left behind for Christ?' asks Godric, wondering if Noah had the same problem on the deck of the Ark. Elsewhere, fearful of the state of the world despite the apparent promise of Christ, Christmas leads Godric into reflections inapt to the season. 'Christmas comes and Christmas goes', writes Buechner, 'and the world the holy child is born to rests, as ever, full of dark so deep that all the Norman bishops in the land with all their candles aren't enough to drive it back an inch.'

We have all experienced spiritual struggle: it is the business of being human. The question is whether we are struggling towards God, or just turning around and around in the widening gyre of modern existential neurosis. Godric - both the saint and the book - have a direction of travel, and it is that which draws us on. That and the prose, which is wonderful. The trick that Buechner plays with Godric's voice - sometimes he speaks in the first person, sometimes in the third, and always the seam between them is almost impossible to trace - excited me as only another author can get excited by a literary device.

The interior life of the saint merges more than once with what seems to be the interior life of the landscape, and this is something else that gives the novel its strange power. Buechner paints the landscape itself as a sentient thing. Consider how Godric refers to his beloved river as if it were a person - 'Wear', he calls it. Sometimes Wear even speaks to us in its own voice, a torrent animate and humming with the energies of God. Lying by the river one day, Godric sees the face of Christ form in the leaves and branches of the trees above him. 'His was the holiest face I ever saw', he says. 'My very name turned holy on his tongue.' Wherever Godric travels, the land seems to come alive around him, to speak to him, to enfold him or spit him out.

Godric is, in the end, a book that lives. Some books - few of them - fizz with life. That a book by a Christian pastor about a Christian saint could do so is a remarkable thing. It's not very often that I read a novel and wish I'd written it - perhaps I'm peacock-proud like Godric, or perhaps I've just read too much - but I wish I'd written this one. Maybe the next best thing I can do - that all of us who aspire to write fiction can do - is to draw a lesson from it: that it is possible to write a good, perhaps even a great, Christian novel. Within it, the world must burn with life in all its complexity. That life must aim towards God but fall short again and again, and in the rising from the falling, the story will be told.

So, that was Buechner, and that was Godric. But that was also a long time ago - four decades now, and counting. Times keep changing, as they always have, and they don’t get any smoother and easier to explain. What comes next? What can be done now with this elusive ‘Christian novel’? I’m not sure I am any closer to answering that question, but maybe it doesn’t matter much. Stories will come when they come; they will come when the ground is tilled and ready to receive them. Reading books like Godric - seeing what has been done before, and done so well - can help charge the pen for any future stories, should any of us be fortunate enough for them to appear.

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A version of this essay was first published in February in the Buechner Review.

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