Visit by Virgin Mary Is a Promising Premise That Goes Unfulfilled

I wanted to love this novel, I really did. I fell head over heels for the book’s brilliant set-up: a middle-aged writer, living a quiet life in an undisclosed city, is visited by the Virgin Mary. The unmarried narrator, though not the religious sort, immediately recognizes the Mother of God for who she is and invites her to stay for the week.

The premise is high-concept enough that you begin to wonder, after the first few pages, who will play Mary in the film. I was thinking Meryl Streep. And maybe Sissy Spacek as the novelist.

“It strikes me now as the ultimate testament to the power of her presence that I had not a doubt in my mind about her reality, not then and not since,” she writes. “I knew from the very beginning that it was really her: Mary, Mother of God, Queen of Heaven, Our Lady of the Angels.”

At this point, you begin to think about the juicy possibilities that surely await further along in the book. For instance, what does Mary--one of the best known and most beloved women in history--have to say about Jesus and Joseph, unanswered prayers and miracles, angels and the devil, heaven and hell, asking her son to turn water into wine and watching him die on a cross? Thumbing through the book, you wonder how Schoemperlen--a Canadian novelist who is not Roman Catholic--was going to pack it all into 349 pages.

Sadly, she doesn’t try. At least not in any direct fashion. Those questions--or any others of significance--go unasked while Mary and the novelist together make meals, walk the neighborhood, shop at the mall and watch the evening news.

Early on, the narrator even apologizes for the mundane questions (“Are you not fond of olives?”) that she asks Mary:

“It has been my experience that if you ask too many questions too soon, [the interview subjects] have a tendency to clam up and say nothing. But if you just let them talk, eventually they will tell you everything you want or need to know.”

But Mary never opens up. Which leaves you, chapter after chapter, wanting to dive into the book, push the narrator aside, and yell, “OK, enough about the waffles! Mary, who ends up in heaven?”

The narrator grapples with some lofty issues best left for academics: for example, the nature of history and time and the intersection of physics and theology. For a few, the book’s premise may be a perfect spark to detail Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. But I just didn’t get it. Especially because the narrator could have stopped her internal noodling and just asked the Mother of God--who was seated right next to her!

Maybe Mary wants to remain a mystery, which could be one of the book’s points that I missed between the explanation of “wave-particle duality of light” and the philosophy of Heraclitus.

Still, the book has its charms. Mary, a person most of us know only from statues, paintings and the few Gospel verses in which she is mentioned, walks into our world, carrying with her a pair of running shoes and a good sense of humor. She uses the bathroom, needs naps and gets money out of an ATM. (Of course, the narrator doesn’t ask her about the bank account.)

Her first words to the startled novelist, “Fear not,” echo the angel Gabriel’s first words to Mary. And the book’s structure is inventive: a novelist fictionalizing her real-life experience with Mary. The writer promises to keep many details of the miraculous visit a secret--both because Mary has requested it and the fear of millions of pilgrims flocking to her house if word leaked out.

So the narrator tells the reader with a wink that “this is a work of fiction,” and is careful not to give her name or the name of her city, saying only that “it is a medium-sized city in the western hemisphere on the northern shore of a large lake.”

The book also provides a healthy dose of Marian history, concentrating mostly on the apparitions in the last 2,000 years. There are plenty to choose from--20,000 by some counts. But the book stays with some of the most famous: Mary’s visits to St. Ignatius of Loyola, St. Teresa of Avila, and Juan Diego in what is now Mexico City.

But Mary doesn’t give us many insider details about her visits, sticking mostly with straightforward accounts that can be found in Catholic bookstores. The narrator fills in the holes with research she did after Mary left.

In the end, we learn much more about the writer--and her struggle toward a life of faith--than about the Virgin Mary. Which is a problem when you have mysterious and glorious Mary as a prominent character in your book.

It’s like standing at the base of Mt. Everest with Sir Edmund Hillary by your side and not taking one step toward the summit.