Well, I finished Dave Guterson's 'Our Lady of the Forest' and am left pondering the denouement and the themes. It seems to me that expiry of Ann the seer completes an allegory of the Passion, and I am trying to figure out who the book's characters represent, if indeed they represent anyone other than themselves - it could be my imagination. Ann herself is truly the Suffering Servant, reviled and scorned, deemed unfit (except by her acolytes) as a vehicle for divinity. Father Butler makes an adequate Caiaphas, and the ambivalent Father Collins would fit with Nicodemus. Carolyn Greer probably represents Judas, who sells Ann out for hard cash and is ultimately responsible for her death. But exactly who does Tom Cross (note the name) represent? I think that the answer might be 'every man', man that cannot bear the weight and responsibility of his own actions and needs to feel that there is a higher force that can forgive, comfort and redeem. But deeper than this narrative is the theme of truth: what is the reality behind Ann's revelations? How did she know the whereabouts of the disappeared Leigh-Ann's bones? How did she find the buried water source in the forest, later credited with healing powers?
Was the truth that she had already stumbled across the dead child's remains during her spell as a mushroom hunter? In the sodden forest, would a pool appear wherever one dug out a pond? Indeed, did she really receive visitations from the Virgin Mary, or were they the product of her over self-medication?
The end story is that the whole episode has a redeeming effect on all who have come in contact with Ann: Father Collins gets his long-desired new church, paid for by the swarming faithful; Father Butler is made Vicar-General; Carolyn Greer funds a temporarily exotic lifestyle through larceny of the funds entrusted to her, but finally comes to realise the hollowness of it all; Tom Cross finds salvation in devoting himself to serving the newly-built church and caring for the son he believes that he crippled; the previously semi-derelict logging town of North Fork is saved by the steady flow of pilgrims and their money.
Ann is ultimately the catalyst for their change, but like so many catalysts, is herself consumed and destroyed in the process.
