Novels

The Scent of Water

the-scent-of-waterWhat a deep well of quiet reflection and spiritual satisfaction this novel is. It was my first Elizabeth Goudge book when I read it back in 2010, and having read a number of her other books since then I wanted to revisit it.

I stand by everything I wrote about it in my first review. There I summarized the plot and offered a few observations about things I liked. One of Goudge’s trademarks is that she writes with special insight about places, and I love her idea that they retain the character of the people that lived there.

Upon realizing that she lives in a house that was once the infirmary for a Cistercian monastery, protagonist Mary Lindsay’s predecessor writes,

What is it that makes one place more than another home to one? Not length of stay. I think it is compatibility. I want God and so did the monks. The unseen spirit of a place has its deep desire and if it’s the same as yours then your small desire goes down like an anchor into the depths.

This idea is worked out in a number of ways in this novel. There is a sense in which the English hamlet of Appleshaw “sanctifies” its people, for ultimately there is something healing in the atmosphere. The richly layered historical resonance of the place is one of this tale’s deepest satisfactions for me.

It retains too its identity as a place set apart, on ground that was once devoted to God. I was reminded of a similar place in The Little White Horse, but in this book it’s a whole community. Though it is not any longer an explicitly religious place, one of its distinctives for its protagonist is that it has managed to retain its rural flavor in the midst of industrialized England. The cottages still have thatched roofs. There is still an active bodger in residence. (If you don’t know what that means, neither did I. If you read the story you’ll find out.) Writing in 1963, Goudge is prescient in giving her protagonist the awareness that this older way of life is on its way to vanishing altogether. This is part of the appeal of Goudge (and of Wendell Berry) for me. Some might call her a nostalgic writer, and I suppose the label fits. But the sense that we are in over our heads in mechanized, urbanized, modernized living, and that something important to our humanity has been lost, is all too real for some of us. The Scent of Water speaks comfort to that feeling of dismay.

Spiritually the book was nourishing to me. In particular I like the way Goudge works out the theme of Christ being at the center of any of our experiences of suffering — of his having lived through it and redeemed it already, and of his being an ever-present help now. Two characters in the story are turned from tragic ends by visions of Christ already having suffered what they suffer. The ancestor and former inhabitant of Mary Lindsay’s home, for instance, leaves behind some journals through which Mary becomes acquainted with her, and in them she writes of a frightening dream of walls closing in on her, burying her alive. But she escapes through a crack in the wall and finds that she is in the stable with the Christ child, and recognizes that the stable and the tomb closed in on him, too:

Two stony caves, forming as it were the two clasps of his life on earth… Shut up in the prison of aching flesh and torn nerves, trapped in it… The Lord of glory… I remembered the sword of light that had split the rock of sin, making for me the way of escape to where he was at the heart of it. At my heart… There was always a way of escape so long as it was to the heart of it, whatever it was, that one went to find him.

Having had this mystical vision, her life takes on a whole different significance as an act of prayer and worship. Even the experience of personal suffering becomes a glad offering, and sometimes an act of intercession on behalf of another. This vision of prayer is similar to that of The Dean’s Watch. (I wrote about it in my review.) Altogether the immanence of God is beautifully depicted in this quiet story of quiet lives against an eternal backdrop. One of my favorite books, and hands-down my favorite by this author.

One Comment

  • hopeinbrazil

    Lovely review! It’s been so long since I read this that I’d forgotten the story line. Goudge had a few books that are “just okay”, but most of them are deeply satisfying.