Review: The Givenness Of Things by Marilynne Robinson

Regardless of one’s own beliefs (or lack thereof), the 17 essays in Pulitzer prize-winning novelist Marilynne Robinson’s impassioned and erudite defence of Christianity make an interesting antithesis to the Richard Dawkins-inspired new atheism that has dominated in recent years. Indeed, if we look back to 2014 and the publication of Robinson’s last novel, Lila, it nestles among the likes of Ian McEwan’s The Children Act and Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things, popular literary fiction exploring religion and spirituality in the modern world.

Not to be underestimated either is Robinson’s talent as a prose stylist. My lack of expertise in Calvinist theology didn’t diminish my experience of the volume and when she describes the process of her own creativity, I was rapt: “I feel a novel begin to cohere in my mind before I know much more about it than that it has the heft of a long narrative. This heft is a physical sensation….

Read more at The Guardian.