At last the minister stood in the pulpit. The heads of the congregation were lifted. Well, there he finally was. There would be no default this Sunday, as on the last and on many other Sundays before.
This is the opening sentence to the story. The minister is the titular Gosta Berling. It is an excellent opening because without saying it directly, the message is clearly conveyed: Berling is far from the greatest minister in the world. The reference to there being “no default” on this particular day of worship is an example of the power of understatement. Without making it directly, and through mere allusion to information that is out of the hands of the reader, the author forces that reader to put two and two together and the answer comes up clearly and strong: Gosta Berling is going to need some redeeming.
Dear friends, if it should ever happen that you meet a pitiful wretch on your way, a little distressed creature, who lets his hat hang on his back and holds his shoes in his hand, so as not to have any protection from the heat of the sun and the stones of the road, one without defence, who of his own free will calls down destruction on his head,—well, pass him by in silent fear! It is a penitent, do you understand?—a penitent on his way to the holy sepulchre.
This is one of those books—popular in the 19th century and the early 20th century—with a narrator that directly addresses the reader, yet it is not a first-person narrative perspective. The narration is conversation at all times as if the narrator is not telling a story, but riffing on a particular subject. Long, extended paragraphs or series of paragraphs may formulate to provide either a broad overview of a thematic concern or else narrow down to a tighter focus that is helpful assistance in creating the setting for the action which is to be introduce. And then there is the occasional example of this sort, in which the fourth wall collapses completely, the narrator turns to the camera and talks without the pretense of objective narrative distancing. It is an example of one of those once-upon-a-time conventions of the novel which has all but disappeared form the form in the great uprising of realism over romanticism. It is also a clue that one is reading a novel in which theme takes precedence over plot.
“I shall have my work at the carpenter’s bench and lathe. I shall hereafter live my own life. If my wife will not follow me, I cannot help it. If someone should offer me all the riches of the universe, it would not tempt me. I want to live my own life. Now I shall be and remain a poor man among the peasants, and help them with whatever I can.”
By the end of the story which has featured many different highs and lows, coincidences, love stories and near-love stories, deaths, revolts, abandonments, returns, fortunes gained and lost, the default minister described in the opening has found the redemption that was tendered as the unspoken promise. To paraphrase Papa Lazarou from The League of Gentleman, this truly is a saga now by this point.
The story of the redemption of Gosta Berling from defrocked Lutheran minister to carpenter stretches forth—according to the particular published volume one may be reading—for around five-hundred pages. It is a densely packed story that never sacrifices the need to speed up the pace in place of situating Gosta’s story within a wider thematic circle of characters. It is his saga, to be sure, but only through interaction with a full cast of characters is he able to make that seemingly short redemptive trip from losing his ministry to gaining his soul.
