Occasionally I get on a reading kick—Regency romance? Memoir? Up lit? Straight up nonfiction?—I’ve done it. A decade ago it was Irish literature, and while I loved a lot of them (you should definitely check out Donal Ryan, Colm Tóibín, Anne Enright, Colum McCann) I wrote this about one of the novels on my list:
And the Year of Reading Irish Literature continues. I just finished Kate O’Brien’s The Land of Spices, set in 1905–1914 in a convent school in Ireland, published in 1942 (with all that implies about the writing style). But the characters draaaaaaaaw you in and then in the last quarter of the book—bam! bam!—it punches you right in the gut, twice. I loved it.
A good friend of mine—he also works in Christian publishing, as I do—comes to Middle Tennessee once a year or so on business, and we meet over a meal to catch up. (In fact, I have breakfast scheduled with him in March.) We’re both readers. And we have a ritual: “What’s the best Christian fiction you’ve read [since last we met]?”
Partly this is because, it can be … well, awful. (Left Behind? OMG. Worse than awful.) Honestly, the very best Christian fiction I’ve ever read was published by mainstream publishers. I have lists of some of my favorites, but the absolute top two are Father Melancholy’s Daughter by Gail Godwin (released 1991) and Gilead by Marilynne Robinson (it won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005); I’ve read both of them multiple times.
But self-categorized Christian fiction? It’s not my go-to choice. It will never be a reading kick for me. But as an editor I’ve worked on a lot of it, and … it’s evolving.
I worked for a large Christian publisher during a time when so-called Christian fiction began that evolving process. They were going through their backlist and having people like me read it to decide, frankly, its level of awfulness. Much of it was just allowed to die. Now, they were looking for manuscripts written from a Christian worldview. No lectures, no sermons, no agenda. Instead, relationships and faith as a part of everyday human life. They were realizing that there are a lot of readers who just don’t want to be preached to in their fiction.
And here I was, fifteen years or so later, raving about a novel whose characters and themes would definitely be considered Christian. (Although when The Land of Spices released in 1942 it was banned in very-Christian Ireland, by the way. For one line. The nuns at O’Brien’s school symbolically burned a copy of it in the courtyard. Hilarious, right?)
This copy I’d read, in fact, is a modern publication from Virago, which is a feminist press. The story is set in the very early 1900s, and when O’Brien was writing it (and make no mistake, it’s a fictionalization of her own life) it was very fresh. Still, the writing style is not contemporary. It’s not as flowery as nineteenth-century literature but there is certainly more of it than what you’d see in literary fiction of today.
In the story, a girl of sixteen, a smart chick from an impoverished family, has won a scholarship to enter college. She’s about to graduate from the boarding school she’s attended since childhood. Her grandmother, who has been supporting the family, doesn’t believe in the “education of women” and announces to the family that the girl will decline the prize—end of conversation. But the girl wants to go. It could mean a better life for her. The confrontation between her grandmother and the Mother Superior at the convent school is worth the price of reading the book.
I seriously loved it. It was one of several books I’d sought out in Ireland the last time I’d been there. (Also, I somewhat don’t agree with the copy you see at Amazon. “Gently marked by the daily rituals of spiritual life” … nah. It’s more about the inner lives, particularly the Mother Superior, who has been experiencing grave doubts about her vocation. Oh, it’s beautiful.)
And when my friend asked me about the best Christian fiction I’d read that year, I was ready. The Land of Spices was it. Very, very satisfying book, beautifully written, emotional, with some good girl power moments.
Wanderlustful 