'“A question is more spacious than a statement,” she once wrote, “far better suited to expressing wonder.” Her questioning books express wonder: they are enlightening, in the best sense, passionately contesting our facile, recycled understanding of ourselves and of our world. The one thing Robinson can be counted on to resist is received wisdom. At the end of an essay called “Psalm Eight”, she wrote that we all “exist in relation to experience, if we attend to it and if its plainness does not disguise it from us, as if we were visited by revelation”. There are revelations waiting in her novels, if we attend to them ...
All of Robinson’s novels require alertness and patience: they demand that we attend, in both senses of the word, that we wait, and pay attention. And they remind us that redemption may not be a comfortable experience.'
Giles Fraser is also in brilliant form when he argues that scapegoating immigrants is the oldest trick in the book:
'the real threat to Christianity on these shores is the narrow-minded provincialism that confuses religion with some chauvinistic Englishness that believes native-born people come first.'
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Van Morrison - Spirit.
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