All the Living

This is, truly, a stunning debut novel. In fact, reading it was the experience of being taken oddly and slowly by surprise (if such a thing is possible, that’s what happened) so that what seemed a beautifully written but somehow rather shallow book revealed itself to be so serious, so thoughtful, and full of such depth that I felt stupid for not having realised before. I had rather expected to drift along reading it, pleasantly absorbed by a lovely image here or there – ‘a late light crescendoed to gold over the grasses’ – but not emotionally held in any way.

Obviously, I couldn’t have been more wrong. The story of a talented but frustrated young woman, Aloma, her hardworking but grief-shattered boyfriend Orren, and the local preacher Bell is partly a half-realised love triangle, partly a paean to the beautiful but incredibly tough Kentucky landscape, and completely an exploration of what it means to commit yourself to other people, to the land, and to God.

Morgan has been compared to the great Marilynne Robinson, and although immediate associations spring to mind – the unabashed presence of religion, the love of the rural American landscape, the exploration of relationships within almost the smallest possible circles – I’m reminded of her more because of the seriousness of Morgan’s writing. Love, and work, and God are all treated as things not to be considered lightly: once a commitment has been made, whether intentional or no, it cannot be undone, or backed away from, no matter what else we long for, or what we have to give up. Aloma, yearning for an indefinable but somehow better existence elsewhere, must turn her gaze back to where she really lives – for better or for worse.

This is the lesson that life means to teach us. It is a lesson that perhaps seems harsher because it has to be taught to a young woman, orphaned at an early age, with a great talent for music but no opportunity to fulfil it – all this, and the threat of poverty ever present too – but Morgan pursues her thesis to its inevitable conclusion.

It is, after all, the lesson that has been learnt both by the taciturn Orren (‘I never left a thing I loved’) and the devout Bell (‘God asks us to be less so that others might be more’). These are the imperfect fragments of life, Morgan shows us. They are what must be pieced together, not abandoned, to form a whole.