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

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 the rest of the world, because I realized that if you leave things alone and don't interfere they generally go back to the earth .... So the stones we pick up from the 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 the goodness of divine 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 the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany, Spain, and the Netherlands. Nominated for an International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, it has been praised for its "universal resonance" (Atkins 1), its "strange interweaving of the comic and the 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 the lives of the 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 the artistic experimentation associated with magical realism, I argue that in Lambs of God she combines the 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, the comic world view always concludes that life is good and is worth living. In a Christian comic world view, the goodness of life is affirmed most universally in the sacramentality of divine creation and most concretely in the 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 the grittiness of Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory or Georges Bernanos' Diary of a Country Priest, to the 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 the basis of Alejandro Garcia-Rivera's understanding of theological aesthetics: an appreciation of representations of "the fullness of the cosmos" (172) that both transcends the merely material aspects of life and integrates them into a deeply spiritual engagement with divine beauty and creation. What is particularly interesting about Day's novel is not merely its presentation of "the fullness of the 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 the 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 the cultural landscape or agents of colonial oppression. For example, priests abound in Isabel Allende's The House of the Spirits, ranging from the judgmental Father Restrepo, to the kindly if rather inept Father Antonio, to Father Jose Dulce Maria, who "transform [s] biblical parables into Socialist propaganda" (137). …