ISBN: 0-940652-52-6

George MacDonald is referred to as a forgotten author. When one looks back to the early twentieth century, though, one finds that he is not so forgotten. Somewhere around 1930 he seems to drop from the radar. By the fifties and sixties the blip is missing entirely. If a person had read Robert Falconer, however, it is unlikely this Alzheimer's would have been as prevalent. It simply is not a novel one can read and forget.

It is tempting to classify the work as a "coming of age" novel in the style of Great Expectations. This, however, would be a mistake. Yes, we do see Robert Falconer become a man while he struggles with the absence of his father who his grandmother believes is most likely destined for everlasting hellfire. We watch his relationships with other orphans evolve and change as maturation dawns. We see how the spiritual fruit ripens differently within these relationships and how the social fabric each inhabits morphs. There is no shortage of strained family relations and then surprising re-connections against different assumptions. One could classify the entire text as one long re-birth that culminates in an approximate conclusion. It is an approximate conclusion because MacDonald leaves the door of possibility open. This invitation to consider the future is part of the literary technique MacDonald weaves throughout the chapters.

Of course, it is not the future of the characters he is inviting you to consider, so much as it is your relationship to God through the characters. Robert Falconer is a lens to see certain portions of the experience. His friend, Shargar, is another. There are heavy flavourings of Biblical types behind each. One can easily understand the temperaments between the two as being like Isaac and Ishmael. While this pairing is one possible interpretation, it certainly is not the sole possibility.

It would be better to describe the novel as a vehicle to discuss the doubts and questions a Christian believer has against an indifferent world. By the time the novel makes its way to 19th century London in the most poverty-stricken areas, the questions are put forth forcefully. MacDonald, however, answers these traditionally snarled predicaments through the interaction of his characters up until he takes away the illusion that the narrator is not a part of the evolving story. By this point, the reader is shifted to the only one "outside" the story—the only one-perhaps—who can see it all as certain aspects of Robert Falconer's life would be impossible for the narrator to know in the kind of detail shared and especially not in the kind of tense or perspective by which the story is conveyed. The omniscient narrator is replaced instead by a character who interacts with Robert Falconer, and so then the reader is forced into a more personal confrontation with him as well.

The writing MacDonald performs in this work is on equal footing with the likes of Dickens or other well-known members of the literary vanguard. Impressively, however, are some theological points which were innovative for the time in which MacDonald lived, although possibly not so little-known in the time that the Messiah lived. One of these points concerns what it means to be a church in the view of an older Robert Falconer, and it demands reproduction here. The context of the question concerns Mr. Falconer's care for impoverished, orphaned children in a private home and what manner of organization he is:

"Are you a society then," I asked, at length.

"No, at least we don't use the word. And certainly no other society would acknowledge us."

"What are you, then?"

"Why should we be anything so long as we do our work?"

"Don't you think there is some affectation in refusing a name?"

"Yes, if the name belongs to you. Not otherwise."

"Do you lay claim to an epithet of any sort?"

"We are a church if you like. There!"

"Who is your clergyman?"

"Nobody."

"Where do you meet?"

"Nowhere."

"What are your rules, then?"

"We have none."

"What makes you a church?"

"Divine Service."

"What do you mean by that?"

"The sort of thing you have seen to-night."

"What is your creed?"

"Christ Jesus."

"But what do you believe about him?"

"What we can. We count any belief in Him—the smallest—better than any belief about him—the greatest—or about anything besides. But we exclude no one."

"How do you manage without?"

"By admitting no one."

"I cannot understand you."

"Well, then, we are an undefined company of people, who have given human relations with each other naturally, through one attractive force—love for human beings, regarding them as human beings only in virtue of the divine in them."

"But you must have some rules," I insisted.

"None whatever. They would cause us only trouble. We have nothing to take us from our work. These that are most in earnest draw most together; those that are on the outskirts have only to do nothing, and they are free of us. But we do sometimes as people to help us—not with money."

"But who are the we?"

"Why, you, if you will do anything and I and Miss St. John, and twenty others,—and a great many I don't know, for every one is centre to others. It is our work that binds us together."

"Then when that stops you drop to pieces."

"Yes, thank God. We shall then die. There will be no corporate body—which means a bodied body, or an unsouled body—left behind to simulate life, and corrupt, and work no end of disease. We go to ashes at once, and leave no corpse for a ghoul to inhabit and make a vampire of. when our spirit is dead, our body is vanished."

"Then you won't last long."

"Then we oughtn't to last long."

"But the work of the world could not go on so."

"We are not the life of the world. God is. And when we fail, he can and will send out more and better laborers into the harvest-field. It is a divine accident by which we are thus associated."

"But surely the church must be otherwise constituted."

"My dear sir, you forget; I said we were a church, not the church."

MacDonald deftly navigates the shoals of what a church is while dodging many sandbars that have crashed less experienced pilots. It does not do to comment much on the above exposition other than to say if a person can accomplish seeing the Divine in the human, then one can dispense with rules if one is also operating from the Divine within themselves. The rules are, by that point, inherent qualities that are etched on the heart. They cease to be rules and become the heart itself.

We might then begin to understand how it was that MacDonald was forgotten in the eras that became the birth of the megachurch. Such humble definitions, maybe reproaches, simply will not do when you are trying to grow a congregation of mass proportions where membership is a defining characteristic of success. Whereas in MacDonald's definition one is a member at the exact moment one begins doing the work of Christ, in a megachurch one becomes a member when one fulfills the rules of membership.

In MacDonald's definition, no one knows who is a member of the church, rather like a group of "anons". By focusing on the work to be done, the ego is removed and a harmony results. By this point in the book, though, it should be noted, Robert Falcon has inherited a sizable amount of money. What he does with it, though, is what a megachurch ought to be doing with its proceeds.

There is also throughout this work multitudinous moments where verse is used as Falconer meets a poet in his journeys. One chapter is nearly nothing other than long verse comprised of around five pages. It can take a little gear shifting to move from reading a Scottish-Victorian novel to appreciating the poetry from the era which is saying something, usually, about the characters in the book. It is not that it does not flow so much as it is that one must jump from a narrative format to a poetic format, and these kinds of readings require a different kind of interrogation and interlocution within the reader to be gainful as an experience. Again, it should be emphasized that this reading is not going to yield to a weekend desultory perusal. This is the kind of literature that a person goes to class to learn how to read. This is the kind of literature that makes one into an English major, and a chronic job searcher consequently. It is not unapproachable by a common person, but it is formidable. It helps to know something of the 19th century and its customs along with its world orientations. It also helps if you have deeper understandings of the church and a kind of prophetic metaphor.

The job of a book reviewer is sometimes bitter in that one only has so much room to say something about the book before it becomes a book discussion or study. There is so much rich material in Robert Falconer that having only the space of a review to speak of it makes one feel about as poor as the kinds of people Robert Falconer assists throughout his experiences. There is an argument to be made that the whole work is a roman à clef. If you are seeking high-density nutrients in your reading, bring your appetite and sharp teeth to this work. Do not, however, be surprised if it gives you fits of indigestion. The fault of that will be yours, and depends on how well you chewed.

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