Book Review: Rivers of Gold

Title: Redeeming Love

Author: Francine Rivers

Date: 1997

Publisher: Multnomah

ISBN: 1-59052-513-2

Length: 464 pages

Quote: “Angel moved out of his embrace and looked up at the stars. It made her uncomfortable when he started talking about God.”

One of Francine Rivers’ literary inspirations for this historical romance was the odd fact that “Angel,” not a particularly popular given name in the mid-nineteenth century, was a common street name used ironically by prostitutes. In that context it suggested the youngest, prettiest, and/or blondest “white slave” in a house. “Michael” was not a very popular given name at this period, either; names taken from the Old Testament or the keywords in Bible texts, which were popular with the early Puritans, tended to identify people with ultraconservative religious groups in the nineteenth century. Rivers’ character, Michael Hosea, was not brought up in that sort of tradition so his name suggests that he chose it after being disinherited, identifying with a religious group rather than his family, though no such group is named in the text. Anyway, he feels called by God to rescue the most wretched prostitute who ever kept her health in the Gold Rush to San Francisco. Her street name is Angel. Only toward the end of a melodrama worthy of its period, during which Michael offers Angel three or four alternative names that don’t quite fit, will Angel tell him her original given name.

Angel’s pathetic mother “loved” someone else’s husband and was banned from “Christian” society for getting caught—refusing to abort or sell the “by-blow” of their doomed romance. If not quite the period of greatest prejudice against women in legitimate employment (but close), the 1830s were still a period of extreme prejudice against “bad” women, i.e. single mothers. Angel’s mother came to a miserable end with only one friend, a male “guardian” (in the nineteenth century women who weren’t living with their husbands or fathers had to have legal “guardians,” like children) who was “not bright” enough to do more harm to Angel’s mother than she did to herself. This man, whom Angel was taught to call Uncle Rab, apparently believed he was accepting money from a rich “gentleman” who wanted to adopt a daughter.

Oh yeah. Right. He was selling Angel to a sadistic pedophile who, among other things, deliberately set her up for a night with her own father.

In 1850, surely the peak of the French Socialist ideal of strict gender roles, Angel wouldn’t have been considered attractive if she’d been physically or mentally capable of taking care of herself. Though her slavery was not enforced by official law, she was for all practical purposes the slave of her evil guardians, whose street names (all Angel was allowed to know about them) were Duke and Duchess. They weren’t married to each other and didn’t admit being acquainted. Duke trained his little Angel to hate sex until she looked old enough to interest normal men. Escaping from his house, she reached San Francisco and was promptly recruited by Duchess, who promised her twenty percent of her earnings and paid less, in exchange for “protection” by a goon called Magowan. He’s not otherwise characterized as Irish and was probably given the only Irish name in this novel because it seemed more plausible than just calling him “my goon.” It didn’t take Angel long to learn that Magowan’s job description included breaking the bones of any of Duchess’s “girls” who asked for their money.

But, before Magowan started beating Angel up, she’d met Michael, who felt called to pay for time just to tell her that he felt God had called him to offer her marriage as a way of escape from her horrible life. Though Angel turned him down, he was in the neighborhood in time to stop the beating when it started, give Duchess all his money to “buy” Angel, and haul her off to his farm with only a dislocated shoulder, four broken ribs, a cracked collarbone, and a concussion. Understandably, Angel does not bond with him; she stays long enough to learn some housekeeping skills and goes back to San Francisco, paying his hostile brother Paul with a quick, overtly hateful sex act for a lift into town. But San Francisco is still too uncivilized to offer much of a market for housekeepers. Angel goes back to work as a prostitute on slightly better terms. But Michael Hosea still “saw her...as the nameless child who had been broken and was still lost.”

This, apart from the basic fact of its being a credible imitation of a Real Victorian Melodrama, is my main criticism of the book. Romance readers like to feel sorry for a sweet, pathetic “child” who’s been led or pushed into sinning, suffering, and repenting. If you want to shed sympathizing tears over Angel’s emotional reactions to every kind of abuse Rivers can either describe or leave to your imagination, and identify with the friends who help her finish growing up, Redeeming Love will give you opportunities to do that. If you like a big fat romance novel with lots of ups and downs, separations and reconciliations, and the sound of a real local legend about it, Redeeming Love is for you. But Rivers insists that her novel is a remake of the biblical book of Hosea, and it's not.

In the biblical book of Hosea, there’s nothing special about the names of Gomer (“the end,” “complete,” “finished,” a name for what tired parents hope will be the last baby) the daughter of Diblaim (“raisin cakes,” probably his stock in trade) except that they’re the names of working people, not especially religious. Gomer is simply a party animal. Slavery was legal in ancient Israel; most female slaves were domestic drudges, but some probably were prostituted; Gomer, however, sells herself for liquor and luxuries, buys more of those on credit, and becomes enslaved only by running up debts to support her party lifestyle. Scholars often think the names of her children describe her marriage to Hosea. Her first child is called Jezreel, a town name that was sometimes used as a man’s name, translated as “God will scatter (the Canaanites out of this city, making room for the Israelites).” Then she gives birth to Loammi, which was not a normal name but the words for “not my people,” and Loruhamah, which was also not a standard name but the words for “no mercy.” People hearing children introduced as “God will scatter, no mercy, not my people” would have wondered what those names meant. Though Hosea explained with a warning sermon about the sins of his nation, many people still believe that he must also have suspected that at least Loammi and Loruhamah were not his children.

Then Gomer left Hosea, not because she was a slave or because his relatives disapproved of her, but just in pursuit of more of her idea of fun—wine and revelry. She was popular, according to the second chapter of Hosea’s book, “beloved of her friends,” not a pathetic friendless outcast. Her other men were not followers of the One True God or believers in Committed Monogamous Relationships. She and Hosea weren’t rich. Hosea may or may not have realized that his wife’s prostitution was funding their vines and fig trees, maybe even his barley fields, until he realized that the woman was participating in the rituals of the Baal-cult with her other men. It might have been the public shame of her idolatry, rather than the private humiliation of her adultery, that caused him to throw her out. At this period married couples did not necessarily live in one house—rich people might occupy their different properties, while poor people might still be living in separate tents—so it was up to each one to deliver the products of their labor to each other. Thus Hosea records himself telling the children, “Plead with your mother, plead...lest I...set her like a dry land and slay her with thirst.” He tried to sober up his wife simply by cutting off her supply of wine. She left. And it didn’t take her long to drink her way down from self-prostitution to slavery.

And there their personal story ends. Before his listeners or readers got restless, asking “What has this to do with us?”, Hosea moved on to his prophetic messages about public affairs, which were what he was paid to proclaim, write, and publish. He used the apparent failure of his marriage as a metaphor for how God must feel toward straying, sinning believers. The metaphor served him well enough that preachers continued to use it for centuries. Jesus blessed it by identifying Himself as the Bridegroom of Israel. Though many people want to believe that the success of Hosea’s book had something to do with people’s seeing hope illustrated in Hosea’s reconciliation with Gomer, no such scene is included in the book or in any contemporary book. We are eloquently told that he wanted to forgive her as he assured people that God would forgive them, if and when they sought forgiveness. Hosea deserved a happy ending, if ever a man did. But addictions are not cured by romantic love alone, and we can’t be sure that that reconciliation ever happened.

The Bible writers did describe some characters in such ways that we can imagine their sins to be mere reactions to hurt feelings, behavior patterns that love might actually have straightened out. Tamar, whose (strictly limited and actually legal) act of prostitution was blessed with mention in the bloodline of the kings of Israel and thus of Jesus, was one of them; she was clearly motivated not by lust for sex, money, or alcohol but by economic necessity. Shimei, whose treasonous “cursing at” King David was pardoned, might be another one; he might have been motivated by a conservative mind, a loyalty to poor mad King Saul. Zacchaeus, the “little” tax collector who didn’t dare try to find a place in the front of the audience but climbed a tree in order to be able to see Jesus, undoubtedly suffered from shame, guilt, and insecurity. The Samaritan woman at the well, whose name the pious disciples probably never found out, and the woman who washed Jesus’ feet with her tears, whose name they probably withheld from the record at her children’s request, are two more characters who are often chosen as examples of people whose sins stem from “hurts” that Jesus could “heal” through love alone.

But our sinful natures are not merely the products of loss or lack of feelings of being loved, much as some people might want to believe they are. They are primarily the products of selfishness, stubbornness, and wilful stupidity. Gomer did not leave Hosea because he didn’t love her, because she thought her other men did, or because she was too badly “hurt” to accept love; she left him because she wanted silver and gold and flagons of wine. She was not a “wounded child”; she was a drug whore. There may be a wounded child within every drug whore, but comforting that “inner child” alone has yet to break the addiction.

That is what inspired Hosea’s declarations of love. Hosea had the ability to buy Gomer, after she’d sold herself enough times that her price had dropped to a level he could afford, and bring her home and stop giving her wine. As a prophet of God he had the ability to forgive her and love her as an example of God’s forgiving love for sinful people. But he could only realize the reconciliation he was offering after Gomer accepted it and chose to change her behavior, and we don’t know whether she ever did. .

Rivers offers her readers that happy ending, but the way she gets to it is a work of sentimental fiction, with little resemblance to Hosea’s book.

For people who like long melodramatic romances—which I don’t, actually, apart from Jane Eyre, Gone with the Wind, and Jubilee—Redeeming Love is the kind of thing they like. There were in fact women who organized missions to help other women in the nineteenth century, and the end of Redeeming Love reads as if it were fictionalized from one of their stories. There’s even a stomach-settling sprinkle of real feminism in Angel’s last trip to San Francisco. I would just like this novel a great deal better if Rivers had left the book of Hosea out of it, and admitted that a true prophet probably understood his own wife’s sins better than Leo Buscaglia could do.

Then there’s the final confrontation with Duke. It won’t satisfy those looking for revenge porn, but it does seem likely to thrill and encourage those looking for hope that they’ll be able to defeat their demons in a thoroughly Christian, nonviolent way. Mere feminism, uninformed by faith, would want to see Angel collect all the money he owes her. I think readers will agree that the triumph Rivers gives her, instead, is worth all the gold in California.