I remembered being a wife and mother, rinsing the herring for dinner, using a sharp knife to scrape away the scales before hanging the fish above the fire. Days later I’d find scales between the stone flags of the floor, stuck to the wall, caught in my woollen shawl. Now, when I remembered how they were everywhere, I saw that it was just the same with God’s love. God is not a being on high, to whom we must raise our eyes. God is everywhere, in all things, including us.

Victoria MacKenzie’s For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain is perhaps an odd reading choice for an atheist, or at any rate, this atheist found it odd to read. It’s not that because I am not religious myself I take no interest in religion, or that I find no beauty in religious art or music or thought because I do not share the underlying belief or inspiration. I am often deeply moved by representations of faith, though I am more moved by doubt and by expressions of humanity, and more interested in skepticism. I am stirred by the religious ecstasy of Hopkins’s “God’s Grandeur,” and by the blending of romantic and spiritual love in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “How Do I Love Thee?”—but the world I personally live in is more like that of “Dover Beach,” though not always or necessarily so bleak. In fact, a guiding principle of my own life is that a world without God is plenty inspiring and that accepting our own responsibility for “the growing good of the world” is uplifting as well as chastening. (I’ve written quite a bit about these topics over the years, from posts about Christmas to essays about Middlemarch.)

So what was different about For Thy Great Pain? Why did I find it hard to enter into the lives and minds, or more accurately, the experiences and feelings, of its two protagonists, Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich? Why did their eventual meeting have no electricity for me, though it was clearly devised as the climax of this immaculate little novel? Or was the absence of that quality—the meticulously prosaic quality of both voices—deliberate?

There are some moments of transcendence in the novel, as you would hope or expect from an account of two lives transformed by visions. After the birth of her first child, for example, Margery is “frenzied,” believing she will die and struggling to tell her sins to her impatient confessor. “It was after this,” she tells us,

that Jesus Christ appeared, sitting on the edge of my bed, very handsome and clad in a mantle of purple silk. He looked at me with so blessed a countenance that I felt my spirit strengthen. He said, ‘Daughter, why have you forsaken me, when I never forsook you?’

As soon as he said this, the air in my chamber became bright as if lit by lightning and he ascended to heaven, not rushing, but beautifully and slowly, until the air closed up again and I was restored to myself.

As she becomes accustomed to the small scale of life in her anchoress’s cell, Julian becomes “a great watcher of light and dark”:

Once the golden light of the sun sinks away, the colour is taken out of things, and the world fades one object at a time . . . In the morning, I watch the world coming into being, leaf by leaf, brick by brick, cloud by cloud, as if every day God says Let there be light and creates the world afresh.

That’s lovely, isn’t it?

But a lot more of the novel is just the two women recounting what happened to them, what it was like to have these “shewings” and then to figure out what to do about them in a world where women’s speech of any kind is not encouraged and women’s religious attestations are not just unwelcome but offensive to almost everyone. When Margery asks to speak with her priest about her visions, “He raised his hands and said, ‘Bless us! What could a woman have to say about the Lord that could take so long?'” Before she becomes an Anchoress, Julian (which was not yet her name) knows “not to confide” in her priest, “no matter that I was sure my shewings had come from God.”

MacKenzie does a good job evoking the character of the times with the kind of glancing precision that we get in other self-consciously literary historical fiction these days—I’m thinking, for example, of Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet or Danielle Dutton’s Margaret the First. The plague scenes inevitably provoked comparison with Connie Willis’s Doomsday Book, as that is still quite fresh in my mind, but MacKenzie gives us only a sentence or two, only a few quick (if still heartbreaking) losses. That grief is an essential element of Julian’s turn to God does seem evident: “Grief marks a person,” as she says,

changing them for ever, like a tree struck by lightning. The tree may keep growing, but never in the same way.

Yes, that seems true: I have often made similar analogies in my own mind, about my own grief, to the hurricane-damaged trees in Point Pleasant Park, where I walked (and walked and walked and walked) after Owen’s death. But for Julian grief is not an explanation, or at least not the explanation, for her turning more and more away from the world towards God.

I wonder if what MacKenzie wanted to do is depict faith itself as a fact, which is not the same as granting factual status to the beliefs, or taking the womens’ “shewings” as actual divine visitations. What might it have really been like to believe in that way? I remember studying The Heart of Midlothian years ago and my professor saying, with the kind of earnestness I too bring to class when I trying to really make a point, that what’s amazing about Jeanie Deans that is too easily lost on us moderns is that she really believes she is going out to meet the devil. The devil! The real, actual devil! Thus her courage, her heroism, is on a scale we can hardly fathom. Margery and Julian feel and see with great intensity things I do not believe in but that they believe in; they frame their experiences accordingly and risk everything as a result, as we are frequently reminded by their anxiety about being considered heretics and burned alive. And yet MacKenzie presents them with no melodrama; they speak, by and large, flatly, or that is how their voices mostly sounded to me as I read—especially (and this was disappointing) in the dialogue between them when they finally meet, which I found almost comically stilted. (It didn’t help that it is presented as dialogue, line by individual line.) This is not a particularly eloquent book, though it does, as noted above, have moments of grace and beauty.

You’d think I would prefer that, as a non-believer—that I would appreciate that For Thy Great Pain trades more in historical specificity than in the meaning or power of faith itself. That’s why I find my muted response to it odd. It turned out that I wanted it to be more ecstatic. Where is its “ah, bright wings!” moment? But why is that what I like, in my religious art, or my art about religion? Do I prefer faith to be aestheticized, because as fact it is, to me, so implausible and thus ultimately meaningless? Give it beauty or give it up? I was interested in the stories of both Margery and Julian, as I know next to nothing about them both otherwise, but interest seems a low bar, and my interest would also have been greatly enhanced for me by context and exposition, maybe not quite as much as we get in Romola, but more like that. That would be a very different kind of book, though, not just a much longer one: to want these women, their voices, their stories, embedded in a narrative about faith in the 15th century the way George Eliot’s account of Savonarola is would change the terms of our encounter with them completely.