Evensong is a
sequel to Father Melancholy’s
Daughter, with Margaret Gower now grown up, married, and
following in her father’s footsteps as an Episcopal priest. Now the
Rev. Margaret Bonner, she is the 33-year-old rector of All Saints, High
Balsam, in the Smoky Mountains of Western North Carolina. Her
much-older husband, Adrian, is also a priest; he is the chaplain and
acting headmaster of a boarding school for trouble youth. The time is
the end of 1999 before the Millennium.
Adrian is a depressive, as Margaret’s father was, and the marriage is
shaky as the book opens. Three unusual characters infiltrate the
Bonners' lives and help bring them back together: a pushy freelance
evangelist organizing a Millennium March for Jesus; an 80-year-old
itinerant monk who arrives on the Bonners’ doorstep seeking the
hospitality prescribed by the Benedictine monastic tradition; and an
unruly teenager from Adrian’s school whom Adrian brings home in a
last-ditch effort to reform him.
Evensong’s Christianity is one
of action more than of philosophical discussion. Margaret is a
conscientious woman doing her best in her job — ministering to the
needs of her parish and people. She is good but not saintly, devout but
not zealous. Such unsentimental goodness is a welcome slant in a modern
novel.
Near the end readers discover that Margaret is pregnant, and we find
out in the epilogue that she wrote the story as a gift to the daughter
she was carrying at the time. Perhaps Godwin was holding open the door
to another sequel.
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