Nov 14, 2011
With this book, Michael D. O’Brien has made a statement. Even apart from the plot and characters of this lengthy and intricate novel, there is a message that goes to the heart of our current communications culture. At 1,072 pages, it is implausibly, imprudently long. In a landscape of digital blinks, and voracious viral fame, O’Brien bids us to put down our devices, find a spot by the fireplace and listen to a tale well told. A father’s tale, no less, in a culture which prefers the terms parent or primary caregiver and may make a father an accessory to the family.
Ignatius Press has followed O’Brien into this thicket of significance by printing his book – those thousand-plus pages – with a hard cover threading together high-quality paper. To pick up “The Father’s Tale” (Ignatius Press, $29.95) is an exercise in cultural and literary remembrance and maybe even rebellion. A book! A story from an author! Something Gutenberg would have recognized – a volume that takes up about five inches on the shelf, and may take a week or month to read. No bits, no bytes, no tweets, no posts or hits or social networking. This is writing – long and laborious, with a full complement of characters who grow on you like a Facebook “friend” never can.
The title “The Father’s Tale” may bring to mind Chaucer’s 14th century classic “The Canterbury Tales,” in which different characters walking on pilgrimage to the tomb of the “hooly blisful martir” St. Thomas Becket tell lively stories, parables of a sort to teach lessons about love, marriage, anger, envy and human nature in general. This lengthy collection of tales – full of fun, spiritual insight, innocence and lighthearted humor – is a window into the medieval mind and served as a model for Western literature for centuries after. The Prologue celebrates the new life that shoots forth from plants, flowers and songbirds in April, when the pilgrimage begins, and hails the advent of a new culture of quest and optimism in the English soul.
Yet the end of the symbolic pilgrimage of the “Tales” was announced in brooding fashion by the 20th century English poet T.S. Eliot, who begins “The Wasteland” with the words “April is the cruellest month,” in direct negation to Chaucer as he marks the close of the English era. Urbanism, industrialism and world war were the backdrop to Eliot’s bleak verse, and he seeks to shore up Western culture with the fragments of literature and culture before settling on the Eastern mystical tradition as the final word: “shantih, shantih, shantih” (the peace that passes understanding).