Mythic Realism: Magic and Mystery in Marele Day's Lambs of God

Abstract

Lambs of God is a bizarre novel penned by an unlikely author. A popular mystery writer, Marele Day describes being motivated by a somewhat experimental curiosity. She describes how theoretically I wondered what would happen if you took a group of people out of contact with rest of world, because I realized that if you leave things alone and don't interfere they generally go back to earth .... So stones we pick up from ground and put into a vertical fashion to build houses and high rises, if you leave them alone they will eventually crumble, and I wondered if that would happen to people as well. (qtd. in Margetts 2) The resulting novel has a somewhat odd premise: three aging nuns live a materially impoverished yet spiritually rich existence in a crumbling island monastery, which a pragmatic priest wants to sell. Whether these characters crumble or, instead, somehow flourish through goodness of creation depends on Day's success in creating a Christian mythic realist text. The novel was an immediate hit, published not only in Day's native Australia but also United Kingdom, United States, Germany, Spain, and Netherlands. Nominated for an International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, it has been praised for its universal resonance (Atkins 1), its strange interweaving of comic and mystical [that] is simply divine (Corrigan B12), its acute view of women and men, worldliness and transcendence (Great Reads D7), and its success in convinc[ing] us that lives of principals have changed forever (Wolfe 50). However, other critics were disturbed by its presentation of corrupted Catholic liturgy (Hughes 18) and a bastardized sort of Catholicism (Treneman 19). Though as a writer Marele Day is known neither for her attention to religion or spirituality nor for artistic experimentation associated with magical realism, I argue that in Lambs of God she combines two to create an unusual synthesis that effectively offers its readers a Christian comedy created in large part through magical realist literary devices. Comedy affirms life; while acknowledging that human experience does not unfold exactly as one might wish, comic world view always concludes that life is good and is worth living. In a Christian comic world view, goodness of life is affirmed most universally in sacramentality of creation and most concretely in myth of Christ's birth, death, and resurrection. Such a world view does not deny life's struggles, but sees their meaning as derived from Christian myth. Christian literature ranging from grittiness of Graham Greene's The Power and Glory or Georges Bernanos' Diary of a Country Priest, to far less dark The Tree of Man by Patrick White, Evensong by Gail Godwin, or Babette's Feast by Isak Dinesen, offers a comic world view that emerges from attention to Christian myth and its temporal manifestation in Christian ritual. This is basis of Alejandro Garcia-Rivera's understanding of theological aesthetics: an appreciation of representations of the fullness of cosmos (172) that both transcends merely material aspects of life and integrates them into a deeply spiritual engagement with beauty and creation. What is particularly interesting about Day's novel is not merely its presentation of the fullness of cosmos through its reliance on Christian myth, but its employment of magical realist devices to achieve this. Far from being associated with Christian myth, magical realism tends to focus on political. Certainly magical realist literature--especially that of Latin America--is peppered with references to Christianity and its representatives, but these tend to be either mere elements of cultural landscape or agents of colonial oppression. For example, priests abound in Isabel Allende's The House of Spirits, ranging from judgmental Father Restrepo, to kindly if rather inept Father Antonio, to Father Jose Dulce Maria, who transform [s] biblical parables into Socialist propaganda (137). …