books

There are books you read and books you wrestle with, and Hawthorne's 1850 tale of sin, guilt and Puritan judgement firmly belongs in the second category. On paper, the plot is a slender thing: Hester Prynne, a young woman in seventeenth-century Boston, bears a child out of wedlock, refuses to name the father, and is sentenced to wear a red letter "A" stitched onto her dress. What unfolds over the next few hundred pages is less a story than a slow, careful autopsy of conscience, community and the damage caused by shame.

The prose is the first thing any reader has to come to terms with. It is ornate, loping, heavy with subordinate clauses, and the notorious "Custom-House" preface is enough to stall a first-time reader for a week. Plenty will find it exhausting - the same points circled, expanded, and circled again, with chapters longer than they need to be and a plot that, by modern standards, barely moves. Approached with patience, though, the same prose starts to work on you. The sentences have a lyrical pull, the imagery is startlingly precise, and there is a dry, knowing humour running under the gloom that tends to get missed on a first read in high school.

Where the novel really earns its reputation is in its psychology. The moral architecture is elegant. Hester carries her sin publicly and is slowly reshaped by it, eventually turning the letter from a mark of shame into something closer to a badge of competence and hard-won dignity. Dimmesdale, the minister who shares her guilt but hides it, rots from the inside - a pastor who cannot look his own congregation in the eye, wasting away under a secret no one else can see. Chillingworth, the wronged husband turned avenger, is quietly terrifying, and Hawthorne is unambiguous that his calculated malice is a deeper evil than the affair that set the story in motion. Pearl, the child, is more symbol than person, which is a fair criticism, though she works beautifully as an emblem of the unruly vitality the Puritans cannot contain.

The book is also a pointed, still-relevant attack on communal hypocrisy. Hawthorne's Puritans punish in public what they harbour in private, and he lays the irony on with a heavy hand - heavy enough that some readers reasonably feel talked down to. Modern readers may also struggle with how thoroughly the novel is signposted with symbol and allegory; very little is left to discover unaided, and the scaffold, the forest, the meteor and the rosebush are each asked to do quite a lot of theological lifting.

For all its slowness and archaic difficulty, this remains an unusually intelligent novel about how shame reshapes a life, and why concealment almost always costs more than exposure. It rewards a second reading, and it rewards it rather more than it rewards the first. Not an easy book, but a durable one.